Category Archives: Wishlist

Wishlist

All This Honor’s Burning A Hole In My Pocket

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So, Eyonix announced today that Honor points and Marks of Honor will be wiped clean when WotLK goes live. As you can imagine, the tears are deep enough to drown in – the resulting thread is up to 48 pages already – but Eyonix does offer a small consolation:

For those with unspent honor points prior to the release of the expansion, we will be offering a few upgrades and special rewards in next content patch solely for purchase via the honor system.

Rather than cry about it – and trust me, I’m disappointed; I’ve got 20,000 points to spend – I’d rather optimistically contemplate what they can implement in 3.0.2 for me to spend my Honor on. If the whole point of the Honor reset is to avoid giving people a big gear advantage at 80, the majority of the new items are likely to be for flavour and style – there’s no point giving out upgrades when the only people who need gearing help for levelling to 80 probably don’t have much in the way of stockpiled honor either. So, here’s some brainstorming from my pal Vikos and I for some appealing Honor dumps:

1. Make Black War mounts cost Honor, not Marks – or put in alternate/variant mounts that cost Honor, not Marks.

2. Battleground Flasks that last through death, purchasable with Honor points. Actually, I think they should implement these anyway.

3. Non-combat pets! Little mini Frostwolf Cubs, Alterac Lambs, Chillwind Harpies, and other PvP-themed pets.

4. Guardian minipets or trinkets, like the much-loved mechanical yeti – they could summon little dwarven battle-tanks and horde bladethrowers, or labourers and peons like the NPCs you see in Arathi Basin.

4. More battle standards – how about ones that give you 5% extra honour or experience on all kills in their vicinity?

5. Novelty trinkets – how about an Orb of Deception-style trinket that allows you to look like a battleground NPC of the opposing faction, or one that disguises you as a node flag? (If you can turn into a tree or a crate, why not a flag?)

6. Consumables other than potions – temporary weapon oils or stones, for instance, with PvP utility.

7. Tabards. Of course I was going to say tabards, but it’s not a bad idea! There are BG-specific tabards for WSG, AV and AB – what about an Eye of the Storm tabard, or some general PvP tabards? We haven’t seen those for a long time.

8. Clothing and dress armor to match the Battlemasters, battleground NPCs, and battleground weekend barkers.

Update: Well, there’s some wasted opportunities. WoW Insider have just posted the new Honor-purchased items, and they’re very uninspiring – cloaks, trinkets, and the unbinding of Honor-bought gems. Yawn.

Playstyle, Wishlist

A Note of Dissonance

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Blizzard has tried hard to make so much of the game smooth and fun, cutting out factors other MMOs think necessary (like, say, corpse runs or XP loss on death) because they recognised they’re not fun.

Take tradeskills. For the most part, they’re streamlined and simple to execute – I have some issues with the amount of reward they offer, but there’s no “because we can” obstacles…

…except in Enchanting.

If I’m levelling up Alchemy on an alt, I can give her a couple of stacks of herbs, a stack of vials, and click one button. I walk away to get a coffee, I come back, I’ve got a stack of elixirs in my bag and 20 shiny new skill points.

Getting those skill points for an Enchanter? You have to execute your recipe individually each time – and if you’re grinding your skill up a bit, you’re probably re-enchanting the same item over and over with the most efficient recipe you’ve got. Each re-enchant requires an extra click to confirm that you really did mean to overwrite the last enchantment on the item, which is identical anyway. So your twenty skill points cost you forty mouse clicks instead of one, and a lot of boring staring at the screen. It’s as bad as fishing, and you don’t even get to get out and look at the scenery.

It’s only a minor niggle, and the world’s not gonna end if they don’t fix it – but it’s so jarring and tedious in an otherwise streamlined world.

Wishlist

What Would You Change?

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So. If you had access to Blizzard’s devs for a day, and you could make any one change in WoW – trivial or significant, but not game-transforming – what would you pick?

I have a few favourite answers to this question, but I’m interested to hear what everyone else would pick, too. I’ll post my answers in a few days.

Wishlist

2008: New Year's Resolutions

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Leafshine of Lust for Flower has posted New Year’s Resolutions for 2008, and it seems like the thing to do, so: herewith, my goals and hopes for WoW 08.

  1. Get as far as possible in endgame raiding. ’07 was a slow-paced year for my guild, raiding-wise; in ’08, I’m hoping we can see and succeed in a lot more content. Within reason, mind you, as we’re not a hardcore guild and have no desire to be – but there’s a lot of stuff out there that I’m really looking forward to. (And some that makes me wince to think about. Serpentshrine Cavern, I’m looking at you.)
  2. Experience the Wrath of the Lich King beta. I was lucky enough to be in the open beta for The Burning Crusade, and I loved it. It was a very different atmosphere from normal live servers; there was a real community cameraderie and spirit, and I made some good friends there. And I loved having the chance to see some stuff really fresh, and contribute to the community: I wrote a Jewelcrafting levelling guide that garnered thanks and appreciation for months, and it’s really nice to have a chance to make a difference like that.
  3. Get my shammy to 70. I’ve got two 70s already, my pally main and my mage farmer, but I’m really enjoying the elemental playstyle, and I’d enjoy questing on her (and some non-raid casual instancing, and perhaps PvP).
  4. Hit the ground running when WotLK comes out. I kind of missed the boat on TBC: I was there for the midnight release, but I didn’t make the most of the month-ish immediately thereafter. I was burnt out on guild drama (we’d had some nasty stuff go down at the end of ’06); I was burnt out on levelling (my mage hit 60 on the day of TBC’s release after a lot of straining on my part); and I was fairly unwell to boot, so I was very unfocused. So I missed out on a lot of my guild’s original push through the TBC content, and constantly felt as though I was floundering behind. When WotLK hits, I intend for things to be very different.
  5. Farm up a lot of cash. I hate being skint in WoW, and I always am. Altaholism is an expensive condition, and a total lack of patience with farming compounds the problem.
  6. Get to Exalted with the League of Arathor (Arathi Basin faction) and the Silverwing Sentinels (Warsong Gulch faction). Apart from the Draenei-only tabard, I have every single tabard the Alliance has ever had access to – apart from the AB and WSG tabards. This must be rectified.
  7. Get to Exalted with the Winterspring Frostsaber trainers. I don’t desperately want the Frostsaber mount, but it is nice, and it’s another faction to work on that I’ve never tried out before. With the improved rep rewards (250 rep per hand-in, instead of 75) it’ll be doable, instead of soul-destroying.
  8. Keep up this blog. I can be a bit sporadic about posting, sometimes, but I do have a lot to talk about. Heck, I have an index card with a nice long list of things I want to talk about here.

So, those are my resolutions: most are applicable to pre-WotLK WoW, because I don’t really know what’s specifically in store come WotLK. If I get all these done before WotLK, I’ll post a revised list for post-expansion goals. :)

What are yours?

Wishlist

Feature Wishlist: Specific Titles

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So, with all the new faction stuff in 2.4 comes a new title: “of the Shattered Sun”, which you get by hitting Exalted with SSO and then spending 1000 gold during a specific phase of the world event. (And to be honest, I’ll probably spend that money, because “Sailan of the Shattered Sun” sounds frankly awesome.)

It’s made me think about some other titles I’d love to see in game; titles are really just flavour, vanity rewards for stuff that doesn’t sit on your shoulders or glow in your hand.

I’d really like to see, for instance, some class-, race- or profession-specific title options. How about “Tinkerer” and “Demolitionist” for 375 Engineers (Gnomish and Goblin respectively) who’ve done a further quest? What about “Sentinel” for female night elf warriors, hunters and druids who are Exalted with Darnassus? “Peacekeeper” for those who are Exalted with Sha’tar, Lower City, Scryers or Aldor and Sha’tari Skyguard? “Hero of Outland” for those who are Exalted with all five dungeon factions (Honor Hold/Thrallmar, Cenarion Expedition, Lower City, Keepers of Time and Sha’tar)? “Crusader” for Paladins with certain faction levels or quests? “Wayfarer” for people who’ve done a given (very high) number of quests?

Some of the above are probably too easy to get, but they’re an example of how Blizzard could provide a range of titles for different kinds of achievements. You get the idea of how they can provide some nice flavour and variety, for people of all different playstyles. I’m sure Blizzard won’t actually implement any of the above, but they’ve said they do want to expand the existing title options, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the results.

Wishlist

Feature Wishlist: Selective Tracking

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Many professions and classes give some tracking ability: paladins can sense undead, warlocks can sense demons, hunters can track just about everything, miners can find ore nodes, and so on.

Unfortunately, it’s an all-or-nothing deal, and that’s never made sense to me – from a gameworld logic point of view, and from a usability point of view. If you can track big ogrey footprints and little goblin footprints with your ‘track humanoids’ ability, why can’t you choose to ignore the goblins and only locate the ogres?

And from a usability perspective, nothing’s more frustrating when you’re on a farming round than having your minimap cluttered with dots for things you don’t care about. Ask any herbalist how much fun it is(n’t), scouring Zangarmarsh for felweed only to be constantly stymied by little yellow dots for glowcap all over the place.