Cataclysm Beta: Tanking Throne of the Tides

Here's (hopefully anyway, not too sure about this embed thing) some more visual stuff about the Cataclysm Beta: me, tanking Throne of the Tides on my Death Knight.

The second part is encoding as we speak, sadly I accidently turned off recording somewhere after the second boss so I don't have any footage of the rest of the instance.


You're probably better off clicking it and watching it on Youtube so you can select HD quality there and such, and even the smallest embed size seems to get cut off with this layout, so meh >.>

Cataclysm Talent Trees for rogues.

Before I get into the lv 80 stuff, let me just say that this new talent system will make leveling a rogue alt (and possibly other, lesser classes, but why would you want to level other classes when you can level a rogue, right?) exponentially more fun.

Instead of having to sinister strike spam your way to level 50 before daggers actually becomes viable because of Mutilate, choosing Assassination at level 10 will give you Mutilate, and 20 more energy. Obviously you can still choose Combat, which will give you Blade Flurry (though not the one currently sitting in your Live realm talent trees), or you could go Subtlety and get Shadowstep.

Ideally you have a pair of heirloom daggers around, because if I remember correctly (good) daggers are pretty hard to come by, but perhaps Blizzard will revamp the old dungeons some more and put a few dagger toys in there for us.

In any case the low level landscape will drasticly change, both PvE and PvP wise.

Interesting to note is that, for example the +20 energy bonus will also apply to lv 85 raiding rogues. Vigor and Improved Vigor were those things you never had the talent points and glyph slots for, but would still be nice to have. If you will be raiding as Assassination in Cataclysm, we'll be doing it with a bigger energy pool, which might come in handy for energy pooling.

On an semi-related note, I wonder how fast my guild will level up and have access to guild perks. We're a fairly big and active guild (usually hovering around 100 accounts) so the first wave of Cataclysm leveling should probably level the guild nicely, between questing and instancing together.

Cataclysm Beta Screenshots [SPOILERS]

As promised, a second batch of screenshots. I hit 81 in Vashj'ir and decided to go to Mount Hyjal. I also made two premade characters on Horde side to experiment a little there, and to explore Horde stuff without getting my head clobbered.

Random flight over Eastern Kingdoms: Menethil Harbor.


No, this isn't a watermount. It's a rather interesting quest.


Gates of Ogrimmar: Under Construction.


The inside of Orgrimmar looks almost unrecognizeable. Note the two zeppelin towers in the back, on top.


The Tauren get a cozy place in Orgrimmar.


And the Troll "district" looks more Troll than ever.


Because people need glyphs even in Cataclysm: all glyphs at 3s20c. Free Battered Hilts, too. This might be my chance to do the quest without paying 16k gold for it.


Further questing in Vashjir.



Mount Hyjal has some idyllic green places, but it's not all moonrays and flowers.

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More Cataclysm screenshots incoming later, dear readers. I have my students job to keep me from playing Beta all day, so I've been gathering screenies over the week and will unload them on you sometime this weekend.

Cataclysm Beta: first impressions [SPOILERS]

I've been going places a bit in the beta.

First I went to Stormwind on my rogue, I needed to re-learn some skills. It's very odd to be able to fly in Stormwind. Anyways, worth sharing with you: this beautiful new fountain, where the new and improved Stormwind Keep is.


After that I decided to try out the new starting areas. I made a Worgen Hunter with the incredibly imaginative name "Pie" (I know someone will like that) and off we went.




The Worgen starting area is full of lore and felt really cool. However, around level 3 my pet died, and due to a bug I couldn't get it back, so around level 8 I was really annoyed at running around without a pet. I decided to try the goblins instead.
The goblin starting area is weird in a fun way, and on Kezan you hardly have to do any combat at all.




Overall though, I liked the lore-filled, dark setting of the worgen starting area more than the goblin one. After this first look at the starting areas (my characters are only 6-8 or so, there's still quite a bit to go) I went for a peek at the two 78+ leveling zones, Mount Hyjal and Vashj'ir. Recognize anything on that first screen?



I also had a go at tanking the two semi-available instances, Blackrock Caverns and the Throne of the Tides. Grab a small bucket to catch the drool when watching Throne of the Tides screenshots.




The fourth boss of Throne of the Tides was incredibly fun, so fun in fact that I'd rather not spoil it. You'll thank me when you do the boss yourself for the first time !

The instance was still under construction - the last boss was impossible to kill because he kept bugging out, there was an unfinished elevator, and Blizz notified us of this in their own way:

Beta for me.

Unlike Adam, I did opt in for the Cataclysm Beta, and I did get in. I'm in the process of downloading the gigabytes of patch data.

I have copied over both my rogue and my death knight. I mostly wanted to try out the death knight changes, but I remembered that being a Bloodsail Admiral might be a bit of an issue if I wanted to explore the world, so I decided to copy my rogue as well.

I will have to experiment a lot, and I'm curious to see how the stat simplifying turns out. But the first thing I'm going to do is explore. I know from the previous expansions that I lose a lot of time with this. Especially with Azeroth changing, I'd want to see what has changed. Beta will give me the chance to prepare for Cataclysm so I can get right to questing and instancing when it goes live.

I'll probably play the starting zones for the new races too. I know I enjoyed the Draenei and Blood Elf starting areas, and the DK one (especially the DK one, oh god that was awesome), and even though I probably won't make a permanent goblin or worgen, I'd have fun doing these zones.

If you have any questions regarding rogues or death knights, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to reply to them once I can play the beta :D

Random ravings

Grab your favorite time machine for a moment and warp back with me in time, towards the end of the Burning Crusade. At that moment, my main is a druid, and the character that this blog centers around is a male human with the two best swords for his level, fiery enchants, hacking away at ogres in Tanaris.

At some point, something in my brain short-circuits. Even though I've been advocating druid love amongst guildies for over a year, even using /g (""\(O.o)/"") RAWR as my standard guild greeting, I decide for myself that I will set aside my druid and make my rogue my main.

Information about the Wrath beta is everywhere, there are movies about death knights soloing elite group quests. I remember swearing I'd never roll one, too. This changes to rolling one for the starting area because I hear it's awesome, and because I'm secretly curious about this new type of resource system.

Fast forward to today, and ... apart from the longer raid experience and gear, my DK has caught up with my rogue main, and will probably become my main in Cataclysm.

What will happen to the blog you say? I'm not sure. I might start a DK blog, I might fall back on my rogue anyway in Cataclysm. At the moment, I'm enjoying my DK more.
Though I've also enjoyed sharing rogue-specific tips with one of our newer rogues.
So yeah, who knows.