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.

Cataclysm Rogue Preview

As you should already know, we were given a preview of Cataclysm talents for a few select classes, one of them being us rogues.

I could try and analyse these to death but since it's only a preview and Blizzard is looking for early feedback on them, I'd rather wait until I can try them out myself when I get into the Beta (Ssshh, it's a strategy *hint blizzard: gief beta inv*)

Anyway, the talent trees are being juggled with a bit, some talents move across the trees, others just move up and down tiers within a tree. Hunger For Blood is gone, as was announced, and we get a new skill that smells of Hunter's Mark (First we get a misdirect and now a hunter's mark, hmmm ...).

There are some talents that beg for attention, though. For example ..

Improved Expose Armor (3 points)
Gives a 33/67/100% chance to refund all combo points used when performing your Expose Armor ability.

Deep in the Assassination tree. With this talent Expose Armor only costs 25 energy to apply. Probably intended for PvP, but who knows.

Venomous Wounds (3 points)
Each time your Rupture or Garrote deals damage to an enemy that is afflicted with your poison, you have a 15/30/45% chance to deal with 616/619/621 additional Nature damage.

Also deep in Assassination tree. No more Ruptureless cycles for Muti rogues, I suppose *sadface*

Vendetta (1 point)
Marks an enemy for death, increasing all damage you deal to the target by 20% and granting you unerring vision of your target, regardless of concealments such as Stealth and Invisibility. Lasts 30 seconds.

The replacement for Hunger for Blood. No cost given at the moment, half the duration of Hunger for Blood. At the moment it's even more powerful than the previous incarnation of Hunger for Blood, so I suspect that 20% to go down.

Reinforced Leather (5 points)
Increases your armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 10/20/30/40/50%.

A strange talent in the middle of the combat tree. No PvE use whatsoever unless we're going to be tanking so I suppose this is to make combat rogues more able to go toe to toe with plate wearers without feeling like a naked clothie.

Other than that, Honor Amongst Thieves is getting reworked, looking a bit like a mix between an improved version of what it is now and Leader of the Pack:

Increases the ranged and melee critical hit chance of all party and raid members by 5%. When any player in your party or raid critically hits with a ranged or melee ability, you have a 33/66/100% chance to gain a combo point on your current target. This effect cannot occur more than once every 4/32/2 seconds.

Addon Rambles: SUF

I've been an avid user of Pitbull unit frames for quite a while, but recently I switched to Shadowed Unit Frames (SUF).

Now, it's not that Pitbull was too complicated or something similar - the thing that made me switch was the rune display. Pitbull gives you this standalone bar with fancy rune graphics. That's nice and all, but when a rune is on cooldown it's fairly hard to see that in my opinion.


The way SUF displays your runes is a lot more minimalistic. I have three screenshots here, the first is the normal rune display with all runes (BBFFUU) up.


In the second, a few of my runes are on cooldown, you can notice this because of the lowered opacity and non-full bars. When the bar is full the rune is back up. You can easily tell I have one of each rune up.


In the last screenshot I show how Death runes are displayed: simply gray-colored bars. One FU pair has been converted to Death runes here.


Another feature of SUF I'm pretty happy with (and one that is also of use for my rogue) is the fact that you can anchor frames to eachother. For example, I have my Focus and Focus Target anchored to the top of my own unit frame.

This way, when I built the UI or when I want to rebuild it, I only have to move my own frame and the others follow automaticly. In Pitbull, you'd have to manually reposition every frame seperately.

Which unit frames do you use? Any particular reason why you choose those over the others available?