New Reaper of Souls Info, Blue Posts, Console Version Playtesting Highlights and Review

Puzzles and Hearthstone

Patch 5.4 - Galakras Preview
Galakras is the fifth boss in the Siege of Orgrimmar. The encounter takes place near the dock outside of Orgrimmar.





Solo - Heroic Stone Guard 10 Player
Maebybabe, an item level 548 Monk was able to solo Heroic Stone Guard 10 Player difficulty.



Battlefield: Barrens Ending Soon - Update
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Ok...so Gahzrookie, the gloves, and the bag will be around...but what about the troll shoes, Xan'tish's flute, and the other vanity items?
Also, titles account-wide pretty please?
Every item other than the pet, the Brawler's Guild item, and the 24-slot bag, and the ability to earn the title are being removed. We know a lot of you would like to have the cosmetic goodies readily available to pick up with other characters or to share with your alts, but this event was designed to be part of the story for the game at this point in time. For those who earned their title, you now carry a badge of honor for having helped the war effort against Garrosh.

The weekly quest was designed as both--and most importantly--an event that leads up to Patch 5.4 and the Siege of Orgrimmar, and an opportunity for level 90 characters to work on getting gear a bit quicker in preparation for the new content. Now that the story of this expansion will be pressing forward with the patch, it will be time to wrap up some of the activity in Durotar and Northern Barrens. Think of the action in those areas as exclusive for where we are at this point in the game (not unlike the gathering quests for Ahn'Qiraj and the Scourge Event before Wrath of the Lich King).

Crithto: I have an alt, a pally I am levelling. What I wanted to do was give her the tokens (she has them) then with the BOA mojo, send those to her so she had a 489 starter set.
I was *really* hoping yall would at least consider making the radical mojo's BoA so that we could complete our sets at the very least.
I would simply like to ask that you reconsider this. At least make the Radical Mojo BOA. Please.
Please know that I completely understand how you guys are feeling about this and have several alts I've been working on, too. But let's not forget that the Radical Mojo clearly displays "Binds when picked up". Simply switching it to BoA would be nice for those who have more than one unused, but it would be unfair to everyone else who did not stockpile a BoP item.

For those seeking opportunities to provide your alts with gear, the Timeless Isle will be your new favorite place to visit. The tokens you can find there are BoA before being used, and can be passed to any of your alts to generate an item for his/her spec. The gear you create will be item-level 496, and as you progress through the Isle, you will also have the chance to upgrade them to item-level 535.

Lastly, while Ravika has other important duties to attend to once 5.4 goes live, we know that Griftah's Authentic Troll Shoes hold a soft spot in many hearts, so we’re currently exploring options to reintroduce them at a later date.

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Mastery Enchants on Characters Under Level 80
We're actually modifying Windsong to not proc Mastery for players below level 80. It will always proc either Crit or Haste.

For flat Mastery enchants... maybe don't put them on characters that don't have Mastery yet. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Connected Realms and Faction Balance
While faction balance is one of the factors that will be taken into account when deciding on which realms we will connect, we will most likely not see a perfect faction balance on the connected realms in the end. The reason for this is that the Alliance is generally the most popular faction on PvE realms, while it is the Horde that is the most popular on PvP realms... and we cannot connect PvE with PvP realms. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Arena Pass Title and Pet
The rated phase has ended, but the plan is to keep the realms up for a while. It is no longer possible to do games that count towards the pet or title.
Just highlighting this to ensure that everyone is aware that the rated phase has now concluded. Any games that are played outside of the rated phase won't count towards the pet or title reward, so you can't gain credit towards either of these anymore.

Just so you know though; the realm will be sticking around for a while yet, so you can definitely feel free to sign up and play some epic PvP action! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Patch 5.4 Elemental Shaman RNG
Isnt half the problem the mastery duplicate coupled with haste induced ticks on their flame shock giving so many free instants? echo of elements was only half the issue.
Several things compounded to create the complaints that we have been seeing for Elemental Shamans, Echo of Elements and Lava Surge procs as well as the mastery spell duplication were all parts of it. We nerfed Echo of Elements to take the edge off of extreme elemental burst situations and we will continue monitoring every class and make changes as we feel they are needed.

RNG in PvP such as the procs listed above for Elemental Shamans is something that our developers are having ongoing discussions about. In the long run what we want to accomplish is to limit the excessive cases when and wherever possible, such as we did with Echo of Elements. The developers recognize and understand that some players would prefer there to be no randomness in PvP at all, but we don't feel that this would result in good gameplay overall.

But there needs to be a limit to it, ele shamans right now aren't fun to play against.
We entirely agree and this is the kind of RNG that we are referring to when I said "excessive cases when and wherever possible". To try and combat that extreme and random burst that comes from Elemental Shamans we nerfed Echo of the Elements and feel that this should help deal with the the extreme cases of RNG for them. We will be keeping an eye on RNG in PvP and continue to discuss ways in which we can deal with any extreme cases that arise. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Chaos Bolt Buff
We agree that Destruction is a bit low in 5.4. We also recognize that, particularly after the Kil'Jaeden's Cunning changes, Chaos Bolt has become a "riskier" spell to cast. To both ends, we think a Chaos Bolt buff is in order. We're going to bring it up by 15% and see where that puts things.

Our general philosophy for Destruction in 5.4 is that casting Chaos Bolt can be tricky sometimes -- working around interrupts and LOS in PvP, or sneaking them in between periods of movement in PvE -- but when the cast goes off, it hurts. A lot. We do have to be careful not to push things TOO far, but we'll see how things go from here.

This change was applied via hotfix sometime yesterday, so it should already be live on the PTR if you'd like to get some testing in. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Guild Wars 2 - The First Year
Earlier this week ArenaNet put up a blog post about the first year of GW2, which includes a nice infographic with lots of big numbers. Be sure to check in with our friends over at GW2Guru to keep updated on changes to the game, such as Super Adventure Box returning!

This article was originally published in forum thread: Galakras Preview, Solo Heroic Stone Guard 10, Battlefield: Barrens Update, Blue Posts started by chaud View original post
Comments 74 Comments
  1. tiandrad's Avatar
    didnt wow sell like 6mil in year one
  1. Difuid's Avatar
    oh GW2 my account got stolen during the big security breach after the beta and could not recover it since then, way to go! I am not touching that game with a 10 feet pole.
  1. Tarx's Avatar
    Nice fight outside orgrimmar, good job monk I respect you and guildwars is awesome mmo but not as good as wow.
  1. Magemaer's Avatar
    GW2 - greatest fake in history
  1. Primaryjane's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by ProfessorTjc View Post
    Guild Wars 2 fastest selling MMO in History? Uhh Burning Crusade? or Wrath of the Lich King? maybe even Cataclysm? That is honestly the biggest lie ever.
    They said "fastest selling MMO" not "fastest selling MMO expansion."
  1. IKT's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Jackdemenzes View Post
    Also moving away from the holy trinity was a laudable goal but they kind of replaced it with nothing else, a lot of the dungeons felt like zergs, I didn't feel like I had a specific function (beyond "hit stuff").
    Pretty much this. If I could change GW2 I'd put the Holy Trinity back in and bring in some stuff to do beyond zerging around the place.
  1. KoolGuyDags28's Avatar
    Oh man I can't wait to see the endless amount of wipes on Galakras in LFR.

    Second,

    Lol monks are OP.
  1. kamuimac's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Nakuzar View Post
    Oh man I can't wait to see the endless amount of wipes on Galakras in LFR.
    exackly my thought while watching this -_-
  1. BrerBear's Avatar
    So GW2 announced 3 million copies sold in January, 6 months after game release.
    And 8 months after that, they've only sold half a million more.

    Sounds like flagging word of mouth. Not so impressive for a game which relies mostly on purchase price for its income.
  1. smiteme12's Avatar
    lol so many wow fanboys getting so butt hurt when some news about GW2 is posted.. babies must be feeling threatened to bother responding to it at all.. haha pathetic
  1. tiandrad's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by smiteme12 View Post
    lol so many wow fanboys getting so butt hurt when some news about GW2 is posted.. babies must be feeling threatened to bother responding to it at all.. haha pathetic
    so many GW2 fanboys getting mad because of fact checking
  1. lyxx's Avatar
    So many fanboys getting mad about GW2 - wtf is wrong with you people ? You should be mad about soloing heroic raid content in same expansion - it's just retarded. I'm not suprised Blizzard is loosing 200k subs each month with crap like this.
  1. Yakuchin's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by smiteme12 View Post
    lol so many wow fanboys getting so butt hurt when some news about GW2 is posted.. babies must be feeling threatened to bother responding to it at all.. haha pathetic
    you got it all wrong, son. We want other MMOs to do well, competition makes Blizzard work harder and improve our game. But GW2 didn't do as well as expected, and that's a shame. Let's hope they sell more copies.
  1. Maleagant's Avatar
    Good job Arenanet.I still play Guild Wars 2 and it is good to see another MMO holding there own.I want Warcraft to stay successful and MMO's such as Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar to do well too when they go live.This is what the MMO gaming industry needs,competition.In the end it is the gamer that will reap the rewards from a better gaming experience.
  1. Aldoran's Avatar
    soloing heroic raid content in same expansion - it's just retarded. I'm not suprised Blizzard is loosing 200k subs each month with crap like this.
    this.
    glad i am off the hook.
  1. But I Hate You All's Avatar
    So many haters hating on Gw2. Grats to Gw2 for lasting
  1. Nathanyel's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Lynneiah View Post
    "For flat Mastery enchants... maybe don't put them on characters that don't have Mastery yet."

    Blizzard suggesting people apply common sense? PREPOSTEROUS!
    But seriously, game designers shouldn't be trying to fix stupid.
    You can apply Dodge or Spirit enchants even as classes that never use them, shouldn't be different for Mastery.
  1. Seitenna's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Awe View Post
    As someone who plays GW2 as his main MMO I should straighten up few things. First of all, yes, the chart has a lot of PR bull*** in it, same as most such charts presented by developers. LoL's chart from few months back comes to mind. Blizzard also does that ("All WoW subs lost is becouse of Diablo III"). The point is, you should take all those PR releases with a grain of salt no matter from who they come from. That being said, GW2 as "fastest selling MMO" is probably not a lie, just some facts bending. They still sold ***load of games in the first month or two. TBC or WOTLK probably sold faster, but you can bend it and claim those are expansions and not new MMO-s. So yeah, facts bending, thats all to it.

    Second thing. Yes, probably most of people who bought GW2 left it. Probably true. But to calling this game "deader than dead" is a fallacy on so many levels. People saying that GW2 is dead probably have no clue about what they talk about or didnt logged to it since months. The only time when I seen bigger masses of players in WoW was when expansions were launching. The only time when LA is not zerged is between 4 and 8 am. New meta events are always full of people and WvW is alive 24/7. The point is, GW2 feels actually more alive than WoW on most servers. Now sure, WoW has still more players, thats a fact. And it is also true that WoW has like x10 more servers which splits the population. If you ask me, Blizzard should cut the amount of servers they have by 50% and do some merges. I dont know how many people are playing GW2 right now but the game certainly feels very alive. It feels alive with 50 servers. Same as EVE Online feels alive with less than 500k subs (at least half of which are alt accounts) but since all people are packed on only one big server, it feels well alive. Which btw. is also a good news for all WoW fans becouse it means that even if WoW will loose 8 million subs, it will still be able to feel alive, all that Blizzard will have to do is to merge some servers or utilize more CRZ and this new connected realms tech.

    And last thing a bit more IMHO. I see some people saying that controls and feel of character in GW2 feels bad. Well, I know it is a subjective opinion and I cant deny that someone is not liking it. But for me GW2 is actually one of few MMO games which does the "feel the character" right. Most MMO I try, the control feels very choppy and that was one of the key reasons why I left those games. WoW was king in this aspect for years but GW2 is the game which finnally does it right for me. I would even say that I like GW2 feel of character more than the one from WoW. After playing GW2, it is the WoW system which feels more choppy for me (maybe its becouse of old models and the fact you can cast 99% of skills in GW2 while moving). That is of course all my opinion so I am not stating that as an absolute fact. But on same level, please dont try to impose the "fact" that GW2 character feel is bad. As long as there are people like me who thinks that it is even better than in WoW (while WoW is still great), it remains just a subjective opinion.

    PS. Lets all play what we like most and enjoy it. Be it WoW, GW2 or any other game, shall we?
    Thank you Awe, You said what was in my head.
  1. 7tage's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Lynneiah View Post
    "For flat Mastery enchants... maybe don't put them on characters that don't have Mastery yet."

    Blizzard suggesting people apply common sense? PREPOSTEROUS!
    But seriously, game designers shouldn't be trying to fix stupid.
    That's what they've been doing since Wrath of the Lich King. Why do you think more of the hardcore don't play anymore? Too many casuals tried to play, couldn't raid and/or PvP. So, the devs made it easier to play.
  1. Razorice's Avatar
    What is up with the GW2 hate? Can't you guys be happy that a game is doing well?

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