WOW Gold Best

Buying gold

A secondary gold market has sprung up quickly within Azeroth, offering players the ability to use real world earnings to endow their characters with virtual gold, and it’s now flourishing. There are two sides to this business — buying and selling — and we’ll leave discussion of the farming aspect for a future article, concentrating for the moment on the activity players either love or loathe: buying gold.

Our recent survey of readers showed that a surprisingly large percentage of you have bought gold or are considering doing so. Especially for the casual player, without spare hours every day to dedicate to endgame raids or grinding for mount money, buying other people’s hard-farmed gold may seem like an easy option which enables you to keep up with your guildmates and friends. The benefits for your character are immediate: you can shop in the AH to your heart’s content, buy that epic mount, and have some cash to flash when twinking an alt.

However, let’s look outside your own personal gain for a moment. Gold buying can have a seriously negative impact on the server economy and on the game in general. A fairly stable auction house can be destabilised by the introduction of people with a lot of money to burn, leading to a form of hyper-inflation where prices rise and rise because money is, quite literally, cheap. People start listing items at incredibly high prices because they know the gold buyers won’t think twice about buying them, and those who cannot afford to buy gold — or who choose not to — have to work twice as hard for their loot. Additionally, the gold farmers supplying the industry don’t buy items, but hoard their cash–breaking the game economy which is designed for gold to be spent as much as it’s obtained. continue reading »

Battleground guilds

Arguably one of the biggest features of Cataclysm — I say “arguably” because World of Warcraft’s next expansion is going to have a ton of new features — would be guild talents and progression. Not much has been revealed about this feature, but it has the potential to forever change the way guilds work. In particular, the emergence of rated battlegrounds combined with guild talents geared towards PvP play can possibly result in a schism between PvP and PvE players, forcing them to choose between a PvE-oriented guild or a PvP-centric one.

The guild progression system is such a great incentive for players to be part of a guild and allows guilds a better focus — a guild’s choice of talents should indicate the character of a guild. Although the benefits are relatively minor, they are telling of a guild’s priorities, such as increased gold drops off bosses or reduced repair costs. Blizzard has only revealed a taste of PvE guild talents for now, but developers have mentioned that there will be PvP guild talents as well. This is where the potential for conflict arises. Players currently have dual specs that allow them to keep a spec for raiding and another talent spec for PvP, but will guilds have the same flexibility? There’s not enough information to know for sure right now, but if there are distinct trees or talent for PvP and PvE, players will have to make some tough decisions when forming or joining a guild. In that scenario, guilds geared towards battlegrounds or even arena play will form and for the first time, players who thrive in PvP will have an environment in which to flourish.

Bored of healing

Vanilla healing

I want to emphasize how simplistic raid healing was back then. It was complicated from an assignment perspective, but if we zoomed in and approached it from a micro perspective, it was incredibly easy. For me, I would alternate between low rank Flash Heal and low rank Greater Heal. Of course, I’d always have the max ranks available just in case I needed them. Healing itself wasn’t all that great but the shock and awe of the encounters amazed me during my early raiding career. The closest feeling I had to working with other players on such a large scale would have been playing Battlefield: 1942 and deciding which bases to defend or assault.

Burning Crusade healing

It improved by leaps and bounds. However, this was the period where Circle of Healing did not have a cooldown and holy priests just dominated the raiding scene alongside shamans. In other words, 2-button healing was still prevalent but we had more options available to us. Did we ever use them as often? No, not really. One spell was able to do all the work. What was the point of having to rely on others?

Wrath healing

They got most of it right. At least, priests and druids feel fine to me. As a healing shaman, I felt I could hold my own and I had to think a few times about what my targets and the spells. Yet when I heal on my paladin, I’m just not into it. Maybe it really is just me. Maybe I’ve grown so used to having a myriad of spells to choose from that I felt stifled when trying to heal on a paladin. The point I wanted to drive home is that while additional healing spells don’t have to be further added into the game (other than the ones they were planning to add anyway), no single spell should dominate in every possible situation to the exclusion of others. Otherwise, we’re going to get the same situation as we had in Burning Crusade where Circle of Healing was just too awesome and it was the answer to everything.

If you’re curious and wish to learn more about how organizational healing has evolved, be sure to check out this piece.

Raid Rx

I can’t seem to help feeling that something isn’t right here. What is it that really matters?

First, I don’t want to give the wrong impression that it is acceptable for a healer to gem entirely for nothing but agility and get away with healing Lich King. There must be some care taken when augmenting your character, where the gems or enchants selected actually contribute to something beneficial. For healing, that becomes any combination of throughput (spellpower or crit), speed (haste) or regeneration (intellect or spirit). Again, I don’t want to downplay the importance of stats. They are a necessity, but I want to shine a brighter spotlight on other aspects of healing.

You see, World of Warcraft is like a massive mathematical equation. If you plug in the right stats and balance, every class will reach the “perfect” combination where they have hit their peak. But there are a couple of additional variables that throw a wrench in the plan whereby it becomes difficult to be perfect on every fight. continue reading »

Guide to Instances

Recently we created guides to help WoW Rookies understand how instances work and their role in them. Author Palintheist over on Livejournal has done the same with a funny, informative guide to running instances for players new to World of Warcraft. Some highlights:

“Mob: No need to ask the Godfather for forgiveness – a mob is a word for monster. Also known as creep.”

“Healer: Who’s keeping the tank from floor-hugging? Your powerful, puissant, never-to-be-offended healer. Seriously. Several classes can play this role and they all find it pretty much a thankless task, as people are very quick to blame healers when people die [but you won't, because you know better!].”

“Pat: Don’t look around for someone androgynous – someone is warning you that a patrolling mob is coming closer and will probably [if it hasn't already] attack you. ”

“Buff: Keep your clothes on. Really. ”

“Inc: If there’s no time to type “pat” or “adds”, sometimes you’ll see “inc”, for “incoming”. [Why is inc faster than pat? No idea.]”

Go take a look, it’s not just written with its tongue in its cheek, it’s actually pretty informative for new players to the game. Save time the next newbie run and just send them the URL.