CS also says that the Racer takes no falling damage, so you can send it exploring off of cliffs and platforms, and he says that though the car is considered level 60, its aggro range is pretty small (I can attest to this, as we were driving it pretty close to enemies yesterday without it registering on their radar). And he’s got an even more devious use (some might say this is an exploit): bosses aggroed by the racer will sometimes despawn after they conquer it for up to 30 seconds or so. That seems like a hotfix waiting to happen, but I haven’t personally tried it, so it may not be as useful as it sounds.

The downside of this is that the Racer was meant to be a fun item, and if it really does lead to behavior that Blizzard considers exploiting, they might have to think twice about including great items like this in the future. We’ll have to see what their ruling on this is, but hopefully no matter what happens (I’m guessing a quick hotfix, maybe even shrinking the range of the Racer’s controller), this won’t prevent Blizzard from giving us more fun toys later on.

by Mike Schramm

Nov 7th, 2008

For our last piece of Phat Loot before the huge influx of Wrath items onto the live realms, we’re going utilitarian, with the easiest big bag you can get these days.

Name: Tattered Hexcloth Sack
Type: 20 slot bag
Armor: N/A
Abilities:

• Has 20 slots, holds your stuff. You might laugh that we’re including a bag in phat loot, but let this be a lesson to you: the bigger the bags you can get, the better your character will do. The more you can hold, the more money you can make, and the more money you have, the better items you’ll have overall, which means your character will be better. The best thing you can do for a character in terms of making money is get bags as big as possible, period.
• It looks like Blizzard is topping off the bag space around 20, too — while there are a few 22-slot bags floating around in Wrath, and there are a few other 20 slot bags just like this one to get, we’re not seeing the huge increase in bag space than we saw near the end of the Burning Crusade. Then again, once Wrath has a content patch or two under its belt, maybe we’ll see bag slots jump up again.
• Plus, if you haven’t run Zul’Aman yet, you should, it’s a great instance.

Gallery: Phat Loot Phriday

How to Get It: It’s a quest item from Promises, Promises, which will take you quickly inside Zul’Aman to retrieve a map. And it’s not even a drop — just waltz into ZA, make your way through the trash to the first boss (any guild that can complete up to Curator in Karazhan can finish off the trash nowadays), and then grab it from the platform to the right of the boss. You can try the bear boss, Nalorakk, while you’re there — he’s easy as long as you’ve got two solid tanks and the healing to back them up — but you don’t need to, as you can sneak past him to grab the quest item.

And the other great part is that everyone in the raid with the quest can grab it. Nab the map, head back outside, turn in the quest, and bingo, 20 slot bag. You don’t even really need to fight the trash if you’ve got a friend who’s already cleared out the instance — just join their raid, step inside to get the quest item, and you’re done.

Of course, since this is so easy to get, you may already have the item (and you should probably get a Sun Touched Satchel as well, since those drop about every other MGT run), but if you don’t, now’s the time to do it. That way, you can head into Wrath with plenty of bag space for all the new goodies we’ll get up there.

Getting Rid of It: Like I said, you probably won’t for a while — there are a few bigger bags in the expansion (one craftable, though the mats seem pretty steep to me), and at least until we see another few content patches come down, things will probably stay that way. But if your bank and backpack are full of Gigatiques already, a vendor will give you 5g for it.

Badunkadunk of <OQB> on Tanaris has a natural instinct for showmanship. And where better to put on the world’s greatest rock concert with your new Arcanite Ripper than the Dark Portal? I think he picked the wrong side, though — having an invading demon army creating mayhem in the background of your concert would be totally metal. *Skwisgaar voice* Shows thems the true meaning of brutality and nihilisms. */end Skwisgaar voice*

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It’s November 1st, the start of a new month, which means all of WoW’s monthly events and quests have turned over. This includes the Brew of the Month club from Brewfest, and this month’s brew is Bartlett’s Bitter Brew.

After September’s Binary Brew and October’s Acorn Ale, this month is a little underwhelming. Drinking a bottle of Bitter Brew gives you a debuff called Nauseous. Once the debuff has run its course (or you click it off) your character will spew, and you get the Girded Gut debuff, preventing further barf for 60 seconds. Oh, and you can barf on other people. Um… gross. I think I prefer the squirrels.

At least drinking the Brew of the Month still gives you Empty Brew Bottles to smash over your friends’ heads. I think that alone was worth the price of subscription.

This is absolutely ridiculous. Just before the server crash about 60 seconds ago, we had six level 80 horde camping valiance keep, and five doing the same to valguard. I couldnt rez for two seconds without being killed again.

I honestly dont give a rat’s backside if it’s a pvp server or not, this crap should not be happening. Make the guards elite, give them some freaking guns or arrows or something that can hit flying targets at least fifty yards away and force dismount.

Honestly, these players should have their beta keys disabled. They arent helping to ‘test’ anything, they’re just trying to prevent others from doing so. 

I wouldn’t mind the economy if I could mass produce everything I needed on my own (read: gather all the materials quickly and efficiently or having a ton of gold). As it stands, the toon I transferred with the most gold I had was my rogue. And that was swiftly wiped out when I learned my new rank of Jewelcrafting (seriously, 35g?) and all the new skills along with it.

Again, this wouldn’t be an issue, but I probably won’t be able to test my professions that I really want to like JC and LW on my Rogue and Enchanting/Tailoring on my Mage because I simply do not have a miner or skinner on beta (and I want to try Inscription on my DK) and nor will I have the hundreds of thousands of gold to purchase them off the AH to try.

I wish there was a way Blizzard could help with this during beta. Such as a vendor who sells stacks of raw materials for a low price (couple gold per stack maybe?) so we can level and test these things efficiently. As it stands, the only thing I am going to be able to test is Alchemy because I can also Herb on my Shaman. I feel we should be able to test our professions, but that’s impossible unless Blizzard helps out or you already have a maxed out matching gathering profession. We shouldn’t have to travel back to Azeroth and Outlands just to level a gathering prof from scratch just to test.

In my opinion, this is how bugs escape to live: because there just not enough people testing something because the economy on beta is in total disarray.

This is mainly in regards to Draenei males, as the females do not have as noticeable of a difference in size compared to say a night elf male.

I love the Draenei. I have a 70 Draenei hunter and paladin, and will probably be making a Draenei DK. I have one issue with them, that i feel should be resolved in the same manner that the Tauren scaling was handled, and that is that they should scale. Right now they don’t. They are the largest alliance race (height is debatable with nelf males but definitely in bulkiness). My paladin mount is laughably ridiculous with a Draenei. We look over sized on the Alliance faction epic flyer, nelf racial mount, horses, basically everything except an Ellek.

The extremely odd thing about all of this is that gnomes actually have larger mounts than ours… which is frankly stupid.

The other point is our gear. Afaik tauren gear scales with their size. My skillherald is the same when i am a Draenei as when i am a human or belf (orbs and savdelight). Our weapons are small to the point that i don’t enjoy being in Draenei form at times. they do a disservice to the big buff bulkiness of the Draenei. The sounds the weapons make then they thud onto something is somehow diminished when you look at the undersized thing they are swinging.

Now to be fair, one awesome point about dreanei males is that our shoulders are big and awesome. not as big compared to us as orc shoulders, but they are good and big.

So i guess just a simple request. Can you please make our mounts and weapons scale. You do it for the tauren now. I am not asking anything as big as the tauren’s, theirs are huge, i just don’t want to look goofy as crap on my new dk horse anymore

Q u o t e:

The concern about information import/export isn’t limited to doing it with yourself. For example, one of the things they’re protecting against is specifically between separate players: cross-faction communication. If they created a web form or chat client, it would just add one more avenue for people to try and exploit.

How would you cross faction communicate through this system? If you’re logged into your account with this chat interface, one would assume it’s smart enough to know whether or not you’re trying to talk to a member of the opposite faction.

Q u o t e:

But with all those limitations, you have to start asking yourself, “What’s the point?” Why should they spend the time and effort creating another entirely new chat system for WoW when the one they have works fine?

Because sometimes people don’t want to have to load the client and leave it open, taking countless amounts of resources to talk to someone whom they cannot speak to outside of the game. It does happen. Not everyone has instant messengers. Not everyone wants to run a program that leaves a 400mb+ memory footprint and takes up a decent chunk of processing power just to talk to someone.

Q u o t e:

Or is your suggestion simply to allow a more e-mail like system rather than interactive chatting? If that’s the case, why not just log in?

No, and see above.

Q u o t e:

Edit: the purpose of this thread was to suggest a way for people in-game to communicate with people not in-game. There are already plenty of ways to do this. If someone is too paranoid to run an instant messenger, I have to ask WTF they’re doing playing an MMO…

Some people just don’t care about instant messengers enough to use it. Installing a program to talk to one person is not worth it to a lot of people. There’s no reason why Blizzard could not implement something like this, as many others have done so as well.

Q u o t e:

If you acknowledge the need for some sort of throttling/non-instant communication, then why not just use e-mail, guild forums, in-game mail, or any other number of communication means?

None of those are adequate (and see my reasoning for “other number of communication means” above). I’m not suggesting a mail system like interface. Email and forums are not a very suitable location to have a conversation if you want a reply quicker than a couple hours (if they check their email or the forums at all that day) - Most people have an email address strictly for signing up for things.

It might not be worth it to you, honestly you seem pretty dead set against the idea and that’s fine, but this idea does has potential. I’ve heard people talk about wanting something like this for a long time, so I’m sure it would have a warm welcome if it were implemented.

As I said earlier, I’m not sure whether or not Blizzard would care to implement it, but I frankly don’t see any reason “why not” - if it’s a social game, lets have more ways to keep in touch with the community even if we’re not in a wow-accessible area.

All right, so not only are the system requirements out for Wrath, but new MacBooks came out yesterday as well, and we’re just now heading into the holiday season. So now might be a great time to do a hardware check on your computer, and see how it stacks up to how you’ll be playing WoW.

So here’s a quick look at who will be able to run what where in the future. Keep in mind that Blizzard is extremely kind on system requirements — they design their games to run on almost anything (which is one reason why they have so many fans), so odds are pretty good that if you run WoW well now, you’ll run it well after Wrath (though you may also have to tweak the ingame video settings a bit, and you may not get the benefit of the cool graphical touches they’re adding in). But if you do want to upgrade the way you see the game, there are a few things you can do, from upgrading a few parts to getting a whole new computer.

We’ll start with the most severe cases: as we reported on the system requirements post, Mac G4 are out. G4 Macs are old enough to not usually be used as primary machines any more (you can see if you have one by going up to the Apple and clicking “About This Mac”), so most people won’t have to worry. But if you’re still running OS X 10.3 on an old G4 Powerbook or Mac Pro, it’s probably time to upgrade — dig deep into your pockets and pick up the new $999 MacBook. It’ll run great, and you’ll get Leopard, which is terrific anyway. Otherwise, if you’re already running one of the newer Core 2 Duo Macs, you won’t have much to worry about — while a new MacBook will help your graphics, anything that runs WoW well now will still run it well a month from now.

If you’re running on a PC, Wrath’s requirements are a little more harsh than Burning Crusade, but not by much. Usually the best and cheapest thing you can do is up your RAM — if you’re running anything less than 1gb (you can find this out by right-clicking on My Computer and then going to Properties), you might look at buying some more RAM. If you’re even slightly computer literate, you can buy it on Newegg and click it into the motherboard yourself, but if not, RAM is the kind of thing you might ask the computer geek in your life to help you out with — it’s easy to do.

Mac users can also upgrade RAM if they like, though odds are it won’t help quite as much as PC folks. Apple kindly sells RAM through their retail stores, so you can call up to reserve a spot at the Genius Bar, and then head in and they’ll do it for you while you wait.

The next step after that is probably a video card — you can find some great cards online for a couple of hundred bucks, and especially if your video card is a few years old, getting a new one in your computer will really spruce up your video performance (letting you see all those cool shaders and shadows in Wrath). The drawback here, though, is that video cards aren’t as easy to install as RAM — while they’re not hard to actually put into the case (all you need is a screwdriver and some patience), you’ll also need to install drivers, and unless you’ve done it before, that can be kind of tricky. But again, recruiting your local nerd (we really like gift cards to Best Buy and/or adult compensation, if you know what I mean) will usually get the job done.

If your processor is slow — slower than 1.3 GHz (so something between 700-999 MHz — again, you can see this by going to the Apple and “About This Mac” or right clicking on My Computer and choosing Properties, and remember you’re looking at Processor, since there may be another speed in there), then you’ll really run into trouble with Wrath, and you’re probably already experiencing slowdowns and graphical problems now. If that’s the case, it’s probably worth it to upgrade to a newer PC — when you buy one, look for some with at least 128mb graphical memory (not RAM), and at least a 2GHz processor, dual core if at all possible. That kind of machine (and that includes the new MacBooks and Pros) will run WoW like buttah.

I’m sure our commenters have lots more to say about the subject — if you’re still confused as to how your PC or Mac will run WoW or Wrath after it releases, feel free to drop your system specs in the comments down below, and we’ll likely give you an earful on how we think it’ll do.

Now that the patch has been out for several days, players are slowly getting accustomed to various specs and talents. They’re trialing them now in raid situations to get a future handle for them when they hit raiding at 80. How well did they hold up?

Here’s a brief summary of the 3 raid specs I suggested:

14/47/0 (Traditional with CoH): Here’s the spec many Holy Priests are used to. Key talents include Meditation, Improved Power Word Fortitude, Surge of Light, Circle of Healing, Serendipity, and Improved Holy Concentration (up to 2 ranks). The emphasis is on trying to maximize your mana return as much as possible.

4/57/0 (Guardian Spirit): Only 4 points invested into Discipline for this spec. You’re nabbing all the upper tier ones including Guardian Spirit. Even though the cheat death effect isn’t as useful right now, raiding with this spec will serve as good practice for those that do want to master it. At level 80, the 10 additional talent points can be used to snag Meditation and Inner Focus. Right now, the one thing going against this spec is the mana regeneration. I get a nice healthy 800+ mana regen out of combat. But if I’m in combat I only get about 125 mp5. So experiment with this spec if your raid DPS is insanely overwhelming. The race is between the damage your raid dishes out and the mana resources your healers have.

56/5/0 (Penance): Key talents include Focused Power, Rapture, Divine Aegis, Pain Suppression, Grace, Borrowed Time, and Penance. A reader brought up a great point in comments last week. There’s no realistic reason to grab Reflective Shield. That was a mistake on my end and has been taken into consideration. As a result, I’ve adjusted the Disc tree spec accordingly. I get to jump into Black Temple again tonight and I’m going to switch to this and give it a shot.

Note that none of the specs above have any points invested in Silent Resolve. Especially with the latest patch and the way threat is, there is no reason to grab any right now. The tanks I play with generate an insane amount of threat. However, please keep in mind that these are suggested specs. Your actual mileage may vary. If you’re encountering threat problems, then by all means feel free to pick up Silent Resolve.