Jame's Game Guides

In case you haven't heard, Blizzcon was last week and a lot of interesting announcements were made. Here's a short summary of what were the biggest announcements, in my opinion:

• Diablo III, the Wizard Class was revealed. Wizard Trailer | Gameplay Video
• Patch 3.1 will be the first content patch of the expansion and is already done. It will include Ulduar, a new raid instance (10 and 25 Man)
• Patch 3.2 will add another raid instance to the game. Still unknown.
  
• Patch 3.3 will introduce the Icecrown Citadel and should also resolve the storyline of Ashbringer.
• Blizzard's "secret project" is confirmed to be a new MMO with a brand new universe, but we won't hear anything about it before a while. My hunch on this is that this MMO will take place in a futuristic universe, involving space travel and conquest and all that stuff. World of Starcraft anyone? :p
• And my personal favorite: Dual Talent Specs. This new feature should be added to the game in one of the content patches following the release of Wotlk. Hopefully in Patch 3.1.
  

What does that mean? It means you'll be able to save 2 different Talent Specs for your characters, and that you'll be able to switch between the two as much as you want, any time you want, besides while in combat or in arenas.

This change made me smile, because it's something which should have been done years ago, and I actually had tried to push for this change back in 2005!

In 2005, before I even started to write guides, I was a warrior and I was the main tank for my guild, we were raiding The Molten Core and Onyxia. As the main tank, I was full protection specced, which meant that I was doing as much damage as an asthmatic clam. In short, outside of raids, I couldn't do anything with my warrior, I couldn't farm gold and I couldn't PvP well either. The only option was to respec during the week-end and then respec back to full prot for the next raid week.

100 Gold spent on respecs every week was really a pain in the butt. Not to mention, I was still unable to farm gold or to pvp during the week, as I could only afford one re-spec per week, and I'd do it on the week-end to get the most out of it.

I wasn't alone with this problem. All the healers in my guild were complaining about it too, they were having big issues with their repair costs and being unable to farm decently.

So I made a big post on the blizzard forums, suggesting that blizzard should allow everyone to have 2 talent specs they could switch to or to drop the respec costs to something reasonable such as 5 or 10 gold maximum. It was a very long post, well argumented and it clearly showed how unfair it was for Healer/Tanking classes at that time.

Sadly, the post got immediately jumped by a bunch of immature posters, their sole arguement being "LOL u can't hav everything u know... u can't be the super main tank 4 ur guild but also be the super pvp star..." or "It's called talent SPEC because u have to CHOOSE for ur character.... what's the point of choosing if u can re-choose as much as u want???"

Basically, the post got ugly and disappeared quickly despite my efforts to keep it bumped and to get support from other players. No Blizzard poster ever read it I bet. I was angry and swore to never post again on those damned Blizzard boards (I broke that promise not so long after, but anyway :P). I couldn't understand why people where so blind and couldn't see the glaring issue at hand with the talent specs.

This got even worse as time passed. When the Arena system was added to the game, people wanted to be able to do a couple of arena matches in the evening after the raid was over. My guild had a lot of problem with people showing up on raids with PvP specs, because they didn't want to respec everyday, and they didn't want to be gimped in arenas either.

Finally, 4 years later, they are going to add this feature. I'm not saying I'm some kind of super visionary here, because seriously, this was obviously needed from the start! I can't believe it took so long, and I'm glad it's finally there (almost!).

If we're lucky, this will be added in the first content patch after the release of WotLK. And that means December maybe, in the best case scenario! But knowing Blizzard, it's more likely to be somewhere in the middle of the first trimester of 2009.

In any case, this is a great change and I can't wait!

As you know, I'll be doing class specific guides in the future and the first one will be for the Death Knight class. I've decided to make tutorial videos to help illustrate my guides, and here's the first one.

It's nothing special of course, I just made it quickly to give you guys an example on how to AoE stuff as an Unholy DK. The video quality is low on purpose because it's only a temporary video, the real one will be in high quality and I'll spend more time on it as well to make it all nice and shiny.

This probably won't be useful to expert DK players, but who knows, you might learn a thing or two, or you might just like the song! Anyway, watch it and tell me what you think.

This is done with a level 61 Death Knight wearing the DK starter blue set, no enchants, no glyphs.
Talent spec is Unholy: 0/0/52

ps: This was done on sunday evening on the European Server during peak time, a.k.a lag fiesta, so don't be surprised if my reflexes seem slow at times. It still gets the job done though.
Also, I forgot to write that you have to use Blood Boil again as soon as your blood runes are up again. This wasn't really needed in this video though, as you can see they die like flies already :p

Here's the video, please watch it in High Quality (simply click on the HQ button):

Many players are asking themselves this simple question: When Wrath of the Lich King is released, where should I go level first, Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord?

Blizzard has stated many times that both zones would be viable for the Horde and the Alliance, and that ultimately, it doesn't matter which of the two you choose. However, this is not entirely true, there are slight differences between the two zones and they do matter a little, if your concern is to level up as fast a possible.

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Horde quests: 87
Alliance quests: 68
Both: 88

As you can see, Horde has a clear advantage here. Not only do they have more quests, but their starting point also has a better position in the zone, it occupies the center of the map, while the alliance starting point is shoved to the side.

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My 70-80 Leveling Guides will follow this choice as well. However, don't worry, I will also write a guide for Borean Tundra for the Alliance and a Howling Fjord guide for the Horde in the future. This is for people who don't want to miss any zone and want to do as many quests as possible for more reputation, gold, lore and of course, more achievements!

Of course, if everyone followed my advice, it would be a disaster, Horde quest locations in Borean Tundra would be way too crowded, and the same would be true for the Alliance in Howling Fjord. However, luckily for you, a large part of the WoW population still doesn't know about this blog and/or doesn't follow my guides, so just follow my advice and you'll have an edge in Wrath of the Lich King :)

Completely different topic today. Northrend servers are down right now so I'm taking this opportunity to write a little article.

Lately I've been pressed for time, the release of Wrath of the Lich King is nearing, and my Northrend Leveling Guides are far from being finished. The guides are going to be huge, each level is an enormous task. So it's taking a lot of time to write these guides, and several external factors are slowing me down as well.

The european beta servers are laggy and unstable. In certain Northrend zones, it becomes unplayable during peak hours. There's nothing I can do about that though. So I just accept it and deal with it.

However, there's another factor which has been slowing me down: taking care of the website. Everyday we get dozens of comments and half as many new guides, which I have to read and approve.

This would take much less time if people knew how to write a guide properly. Sadly, most don't and I have to work on their guides for them or put the guides back to draft status and explain to the author why.

There are several reasons why some guide just can't be published:

1. Redundancy - This is the most frequent reason. Some people just create a guide without even checking if the topic has already been covered in another guide. I think we've got about 15 Durotar (1-12) Leveling Guides so far, and the worst part is, that none of them is of high quality. We don't need 15 Durotar Guides, we just need one, and possibly a high quality one.
So please people, before you write a guide, check if the topic has already been covered, and if it has, don't write a guide about it UNLESS you're confident you can write a much better guide on the topic.

2. Horrible Grammar & Spelling - This is reason #2. Some people just write a wall of text, no punctuation, no caps, no paragraphs, no spell check, no text formatting at all, zero image, loads of typos and grammar errors. The end result is something ugly nobody wants to read. And that's sad, because some of those guides actually have interesting content, but they are just presented so poorly that nobody will even try to read them. Hell, some people even misspell the title of their guide.

Example: Duratar Lvling Guild (instead of Durotar Leveling Guide)

3. Useless content - This is more seldom, but it still happens that some people write guides which would even be useless to complete newbie. Like: "A mage casts spells, you can either take talents for Fire, Frost or Arcane. If you take Frost talents, you will use your frost spells more...etc".
Seriously, who needs such a guide? :P

4. Poor content - This is the most painful one. Sometimes, people actually write a guide which looks nice, has a few images and decent text formatting, but the content is just bad. This happens most of the time when people try to write a guide about a topic they aren't very experienced in.
For example, many people try to write a class guide, even though they've barely played the class themselves. The end result is that they'll just disappoint people who follow their guide and then realize that the advice given was very poor.
Here's what I suggest: Don't write a class guide until you've played the class extensively, reached level 70 (or 80 soon) and tried all 3 talents trees, solo, in group and if possible in a raid.
This applies to every other aspect of the game. Only write a guide when you know that you've got above average knowledge on a certain topic.

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Anyway, to fix this issue, I've put together a little guide this morning, covering the most important points of guide writing, in a very condensed form. I hope it will help the wow-pro community to produce better guides and I encourage everyone to read it and try to write a useful guide.

Here is the link to the guide:

Jame's Guide Writing Guide

Time for me to go back to Northrend and to work on my leveling guides :P

Many have been asking, so here they are - Death Knight Rotations to do the most possible DPS. Please keep in mind these are calculated with talent specs tailored for leveling, starting at level 61. Once you switch to a raiding spec, things will probably be different.

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