Posted on May 29th, 2009 by admin
Later this year Microsoft will release its next major desktop operating system, Windows 7. After deciding now was the time to expand my hard drives (because I really need 3TBs of space), I took the opportunity to install the “release candidate.” The release candidate of wow goldWindows 7 is just that – it’s a version of the operating system that while still in development, has all the bells and whistles, and is essentially the exact same thing that’ll be sold on the shelves.
The installation and configuration of Windows 7 went very smoothly. My computer has four gigs of RAM and operates off of two dual-core Intel Core2 processors. I have an nVidia GTX 260 graphics card, which is the latest generation. There’s a bunch of other bells and whistles that I have as well, but those are the big things relevant to what I do every day here at WoW.com and how I play WoW.
Prior to installing Windows 7, I used Windows Vista updated to the latest patches. I got
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Posted on May 26th, 2009 by admin
Posted on May 25th, 2009 by admin
Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your wow goldAddons folder, we’ll cover it here.
Power Auras Classic is, as the name might suggest, a powerful mod. It does something that you may not know you had a need for: displaying visuals on your screen based on various conditions. For instance, on my rogue, I have it set to display a big red blood drop in the left-center of the screen whenever I don’t have Hunger for Blood up.
It’s incredibly flexible, and as is the case with most very flexible mods, it takes some work to get the most out of it. For each aura, you can set the position, size, color, and alpha of the texture you want displayed, what conditions you want it displayed under, how you want it to fade in and out, and probably more options I haven’t gotten to playing around with yet.
For those of you scratching your heads right now,
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Posted on May 24th, 2009 by admin
One thing Blizzard likes to slip in every few patches is a new UI function that “replaces” a popular add-on or set off addons. They’ve done it with Scrolling Combat Text, Threat Meters, and most recently, with Equipment Managers.
The New Equipment Manager is nice, but it’s also pretty basic. You choose wow goldto save a set, choose a name and icon for the set, and there you go. You can drag the new icon onto your toolbar for quick changes, at least, but there’s not much else. You can’t synchronize it with a talent change. You can’t set events to automatically change sets. Because of this, or even because of straight up familiarity and the issue of remaking all your sets in the new system, I’m sure a lot of people will stick to addons like ClosetGnome and Itemrack (if it ever updates).
Equipment Manager certainly isn’t the only example of this. I still use Parrot over Blizzard’s default Scrolling Combat Text because I like
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Posted on May 22nd, 2009 by admin
The new, rapid pace of Blizzard development continues as the Under Development page let slip that the new Battleground will be called the Isle of Conquest. We’d known for a while now that the next major content patch, Patch 3.2, would have a new Battleground, there were little details beyond that. For a while, there was some speculation that the abandoned development in Azshara would be revisited, but it looks like this is an entirely new Battleground that implements more siege weapons and vehicles.
Even though vehicle combat has gotten fairly mixed reviews, we know for a fact that it works rather well in PvP implementations such as Lake Wintergrasp and Strand of the Ancients. Wintergrasp, in particular, has been so popular that it has created all sorts of problems for Blizzard, leading to the development team finding ways to actually reduce the number of people playing in it. If Wintergrasp is any indication, the Isle of Conquest should be incredibly fun, as well. The key
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Posted on May 21st, 2009 by admin
A while back I wrote a short post pointing out to the community that now is a pretty ripe time to see how Retribution can be improved. Ghostcrawler and the devs have taken an interesting direction with the Retribution wow potree, and although they’ve recently mentioned that there will no longer be big changes throughout Wrath of the Lich King, it’s still a good time to examine the spec. It’s come a long way since the launch of the game and ‘lolret’ is arguably a term now only used in spite and no longer with genuine ridicule. Ridicule and some fear and loathing, maybe, but no longer just ridicule.
Despite the statement that there’ll be fewer changes to classes in the foreseeable future, Ghostcrawler did say “there will be some (changes)“ in addition to “tweak(ing) numbers up and down as needed”. So don’t despair, Fury Warriors, you’ll be swinging those two-handers once again in glory one of these days.
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Posted on May 20th, 2009 by admin
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW’s newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.
What’s that? You can’t hear because you’re wanding? That’s a good thing, young caster, a very good thing – because doing damage from afar is the savvy caster’s modus operandi. At higher levels, wands are usually reserved for backup duty when you’ve run out of wow goldmana. For a leveling player, however, a wand is an effective method of killing mobs while reserving your limited mana pool for crowd control or healing.
As a caster, resist the temptation to tough it out and let mobs (monsters) get up in your face. Wands put out fairly healthy DPS (damage per second), and you’ll do more damage wanding than you will whacking things with your melee weapon. Besides, using your wand helps you get used to keeping your distance; you’re wearing cloth armor and should avoid taking direct hits
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Posted on May 19th, 2009 by admin
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider’s daily Q&A wow goldcolumn where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.
Howdy folks. Alex and I had to take a little time away from our daily column to focus on other things. While I can’t say just yet what we’ve been working on, I can say that you’ll enjoy it when you see it.
It’s a surprise! You’ll be surprised. Tomorrow. Hopefully. But now I’ve probably jinxed it.
Oh gawd, what have I done?
SpearXXI asked…
“Is there a way to get the White Hippogryph that is at the flight point of the Argent Tournament?”
Nope. That’s a Silver Covenant Hippogrpyh and there is no way for players to currently get it. For a long time it was thought to be the Argent Tournament Hippogryph though, but that turned out to be incorrect.
Zainwolf asked…
“What I’m wondering is if the tournament mounts can be
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Posted on May 17th, 2009 by admin
Mellere of Wildhammer posted a brief lament about her guild leaders treatment of a Discipline Priest. The discipline priest was below a Retadin on HPS. Without understanding the role of mitigation as a healer, the Raid Leader told him to go holy to bring up his HPS. The OP expressed disappointment in the RL at this action.
Several responders posted that this is partly the fault of wow goldBlizzard as they don’t take into account shielding and mitigation to healing scores in the combat log. Daerilla of Spirestone intimated that she did not want to see mitigation included in healing figures, because then people would take notice of how overpowered Disc Priests are in raids. There were some less-than-kind comments about the Raid Leader’s competence.
Raid leaders, be sure to give credit where credit is due. Trust that your healing leader and raiders know what they’re doing. The raid leader should have a decent understanding of class/spec roles, and adjust their
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Posted on May 15th, 2009 by admin
As I mentioned last week, they’re hotfixing Lightning Overload: The chance for the Lightning Overload talent to be triggered is being increased from 7/13/20% to 11/22/33%. The reason wow goldthis change is going live is a little more confusing. It’s going live because elemental shaman DPS is low, but the developers can find no reason for it.
I find this interesting because it’s illustrative of the complexity of the game itself and also of the elemental shaman and the way the class interacts with others for its damage potential. We can assume that the damage loss moving from Naxxramas to Ulduar is real, because the developers are already hotfixing a change to compensate for it (something they have not done for other classes that have demonstrated DPS loss in Ulduar) and so we’re left with something of a mystery. Why is elemental shaman DPS decreasing since patch 3.1?
I won’t pretend I know better than anyone else. If the people who work to predict and
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