Path of the Titans, Rankwatch, Blue posts

[Boubouille]

Cataclysm - Path of the Titans
The Path of the Titans is a new form of character leveling introduced in the next expansion. The system is an expansion of the existing Glyphs and will ultimately add 10 Ancient Glyphs slots to your character.

Ancient Glyphs are new items discovered through the new Archaeology profession, at this point we don't really have many details on it and I will probably write a mini-post later.

Unlike conventional Glyphs, the Ancient Glyphs won't be tied to a class. Players will join cults dedicated to various titans and will follow its path, unlocking new glyph slots as they progress. You can earn progress down any of these paths by doing things such as questing, raiding, PvP, trade skills, etc. with a possible weekly cap for maximum progress. Over time, you’ll be able to unlock new ancient glyphs that will greatly benefit your character.

During the Blizzcon developers made it clear that the goal will be gated and not grindy and that everyone would eventually get all their ancient glyphs. More slots might be added after the release of the expansion (in content patches, etc ...)

The known paths are:

• Path of Aman’Thul, the High Father
• Path of Eonar, the Lifebinder
• Path of Norgannon, the Dreamweaver
• Path of Khaz’Goroth, the Shaper
• Path of Aggramar, the Avenger
• Path of Golganneth, the Thunderer

We also saw a few glyphs from the Path of Golganneth, you can only pick one glyph for each rank.

• Rank 1 - Path of Golganneth - Physical damage taken reduced by 4%. or Reduces the duration of Bleed and Stun effects by 20%.
• Rank 2 - Path of Golganneth - Bandages heal targets by an additional 30%. or Nearby allies take 10% less damage for 6 sec. Instant. 5 min cooldown.
• Rank 3 - Path of Golganneth - Increases damage dealt by 10% for 10 sec. Only usable after you deal a critical strike. Instant. 5 min cooldown. or 2nd Glyph unknown

Making all paths available to all classes will most likely create an insane amount of possibilities and it probably won't be a problem to find a tree that suits your playstyle.

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Addon Review - Rankwatch
Cross-realms dungeons are awesome, players sometimes aren't. Rankwatch is one of the most useful mod I used, it will monitor the spells cast by you and your party/raid members and warn them if they are using a downranked spell. A lot of people are running around and use lower ranks of spells because they never changed their bars or trained them after dual speccing, or even just because they use an outdated/bugged bar management addon.

It's also very useful when leveling an alt, when the amount of lower ranks becomes too high you know it's time to train! Of course it's nothing compared to the joy of knowing you made the world of cross-realms dungeons better because the addon yelled at your paladin tank when he used his Rank 1 Consecration in the Halls of Reflection. Download it, now.

Blue posts

"Interesting" stats
I think you're approaching it as a player, in which your goal is to improve your character as much as you can as fast as you can. From that viewpoint, any piece of loot that isn't an unambiguous upgrade just gets in your way. But think for a moment about the over-arcing design of loot in the game and the role it fills. Deciding what is an upgrade is part of the challenge in the same way figuring out to beat the boss is part of the challenge. The hit stat represents a gearing challenge because you can't just assume any loot from Icecrown is an automatic upgrade. It may be a huge upgrade. It may be a sidegrade. It may be a slight upgrade, but only if you swap around a couple of other pieces, consider regemming, etc.

In short, you have to game it.

Put another way, even if there is a "best in slot" list for every spec, the order in which you get those pieces is significant, and makes you have to think and solve problems. That's why I call hit "interesting." Spellpower, while quite desirable, is not interesting in that more is always better to the extent that we can't even offer variation on it from one piece to the next any longer. The rating-based stats, especially those with caps as low as hit, cause you have to solve the puzzle in order to wear them. There aren't a lot of huge decisions you make in WoW, beyond perhaps your class and maybe your guild. But there are a lot of little decisions that when taken together make the game fairly compelling.

Too often players approach gear design as "I would never wear that piece, therefore it's a badly designed piece." But consider for a moment that badge vendor +hit trinket again. It might not be attractive to you personally assuming you're hit capped in your current gear. Your conclusion might be that the trinket was itemized wrong. But that might not be the conclusion of say a Resto druid who decides to try Balance and now has a huge hit deficit to overcome. Regemming or farming old content is one way to do it, but relatively slow and / or painful. Getting a shiny new trinket off a vendor (i.e. isn't even subject to the whims of boss loot RNG) with a whole bucket of +hit on it starts to look pretty attractive. Just because the piece isn't for you doesn't mean it isn't filling a gap in the fabric of the game. (Source)

+Hit bonus
I will agree that the complication from hit that comes from bosses being higher level than characters, along with the difference among melee and spell hit and dual wield hit make the system more confusing than it needs to be, and the various raid buffs (and particularly Heroic Presence) can put you in a mode of constantly swapping around rings and bracers or whatever. This is something we'd like to improve. (Source)

Spellpower, AP, and Armor Pen changes in Cataclysm
We're changing spellpower, attack power and armor pen for other reasons, not really because they're confusing. For example, armor pen is almost impossible to balance because of the way armor works. Spellpower we're actually pulling because it's too boring -- it can virtually be derived from item level and we figure if we have to put both it and Intellect in equal proportions on every piece then something's wrong. AP makes us split leather stats in weird ways that make it attractive to warriors and hunters. It's just a cleaner design where everyone has a primary stat: Str, Agi or Int. Those are simple explanations to the point of almost being inaccurate, but you get the idea. (Source)

Not enough Emblems of Frost?
I am fairly confident we will all be drowning in Frost in several months wishing we had something else to spend it on. They feel precious now because the income is low because there are so few Icecrown bosses available (coupled with the fact that you aren't getting much non-badge loot because so few Icecrown bosses are available). (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Death Knights Offtanks
I don't think "offtank" is a role these days the way "healer" is a role. Most guilds have a main tank that they use on single target encounters, then they have a second tank that they use if the fight needs another tank. Maybe the MT is a better player or shows up more reliably or maybe she's the guild leader or maybe that's just the way the guild has always done it. For these guilds, presumably the warrior tanks Onyxia and the DK picks up the adds. On Twin Valks, each of them tanks one boss. On Mimiron, the DK probably doesn't do much tanking until the end. I wasn't trying to imply that DKs have a set of abilities or stats that make them suitable for OTing but not MTing. I was just pointing out that there are a lot of guilds with warrior MT and DK OT. I can't say for certain that this is the most common setup among cutting-edge guilds because I haven't looked lately, but my hunch is that is the case. There are actually quite a few different combinations of MT and OT that get used, which is a good thing. (Source)

[Amran20]

Wow, I really like this new path of the titans feature. Character power customization = good!

[Sliske]

i cant wait for 4.0 and cataclysm i want all this new stuff cause im bored atm hopefully it will come out before summer


cant really think how we get the ancient glyphs though if we dont grind them and dont think we'll get them through raiding

probably just a long ass quest chain

[LavaDuck]

A lot of people are running around and use lower ranks of spells because they never changed their bars or trained them after dual speccing

o/ Guilty.

[bldneunr]

@Not enough Emblems of Frost?

I lol'd.

[cyan421]

Download an addon to tell people that they rely on addons too much. And they don't know how to play because of it, haha!

also Archeology is a new secondary skill, not a profession. Everyone can level it.

[LavaDuck]

Download an addon to tell people that they rely on addons too much. And they don't know how to play because of it, haha!

also Archeology is a new secondary skill, not a profession. Everyone can level it.

Secondary profession

[Marvdatboi]

I'm loving the stuff they are coming up with.

[Sansai]

Sooo, Boub.

Maybe it actually was u I met in cod a few hours ago?
U said u next post were gonna be about this!

[Boubouille]

Yes, and you suck at MW2.

[Buckwald]

I'm excited about the new Path of the Titans. Specifically "Path of Aggramar, the Avenger". Just my luck it won't be a melee DPS path.

[Sansai]

Yes, and you suck at MW2.

Haha, well in my defence!

I bought it yesterday, and I spend too much time on wow anyways :<
Lol'd at that guy dissing ur score aswell

[BaddyMcBad]

Look like Cataclysm will make things very interesting ;D

[NefariousNinja]

These posts keep teasing me about what's to come ;D

[Aldarc]

Too bad they do not have a Titan Path of Sargeras for the unhinged player cultists.

That said, it will be highly interesting to see how these paths are distinguished and what benefits they bring to certain play styles.

[LavaDuck]

Yes, and you suck at MW2.

If you get told by the master himself, then you suck indeed ^_^

And yes, I suck at it too :P

edit: less spacebar pressing :>

[Revrant]

So in short, players despise hit with a passion because you get us to 14 fucking percent and waste valuable stats over-itemizing it into everything useful, and you remove the grand majority of stats people do use in Cata, leaving us with yet more shitty annoying hit.

Backwards much, Blizz?

[Natedog]

RankWatch is pretty amazing. If you want some real laughs go to AV and watch it in action.

When you join a party just type:
/rankwatch party
/rankwatch whisper none

You're set. Let people get mad, it's a pretty polite mod and doesn't message people but everyone 5 minutes. (300 seconds) unless their using lots of wrong spells. My only gripe is that the settings don't save and you have to retype them in each time.

[Ramuh]

@Boubz, got a question for ya. Are you doing these Cataclysm summary just for the lack of any interesting news over the holidays or because you might know something we dont know from some of your inside information sources =)

@Hit Rating, i really dislike that, because its such a low, easy to reach and easy too overshoot HARD cap, anything over the cap is just waste. All almost all hit from gear in most specs is utterly useless on trash, since you hit always anyway.

My Ideas are, one make the hit cap "softer" i.e. you have the x rating to hit everytime. Everything after that could also improve your damage but significantly less, like lowering glancings/partial resists.

In that way i like how hit works for dual wield classes. They need x for style cap, everything over that improves your white hits. Its not much, but its better than nothing. For Casters everything over the cap is as said wasted.

Other Idea would be to make it much much much harder to reach hit cap, but that might be even worse.


As an Arcane Mage, with really low hit requirement (around 200 as alliance), i hate that juggling around the hit cap. Damn Hit

[Eucep]

Actually, what stuck out for me more in those images were the normal glyphs, seems they intend to change the class based ones to have icons linked to their spells/powers, making identification way easier.