Want to level a character quick and have it on level 80 in no time? Check out my free WoW Character Levelling guide! It is good for Horde and Alliance alike and guaranteed to work!

Step 1: Make an alt.

Step 2: Level it to level 15 using the starting zone quests and the first followup zone.

Step 3: Queue for random dungeons.

Step 4-120: Run random dungeons until level 80.

While waiting for your dungeon queue, you can quest or grind boars or level a profession.

Really not much to it, eh?

As a promotion, the cool game “Portal” is now available for free on Steam (http://www.steampowered.com/)!
Portal is a mind-blowing game utilizing the Half-Life 2 engine and focusing on puzzling, instead of shooting things. In this game, you have a portal cannon that you can use to open, err, yes, portals. These obey the law of physics (if you throw something onto a portal on the floor, it will fall through) and are used for all kinds of very tricky puzzles.

Portal is a very nice casual game, with a steep learning curve and lots of mind-boggling tricks to it. You should download it now – the promotion only lasts until 24th of May

So, someone leaked an early alpha version of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Everyone’s pretty much in arms about it and weirdly enough, no official statements by Blizzard have been posted yet.

Usually after a such leak, warnings ensue that the downloads will be trojaned, you shouldn’t install untrusted (i.e. pirated) software, that your WoW account might be phished, etc.

In this case, however, it’s quite easy to see if the Alpha is authentic. And from all I can see, it is. The installer is digitally signed by a Thawte Code Signing certificate issued on April 30th, 2010 to… Blizzard.

The installer (which merges new content with a copy of your “normal” WoW installation) downloads files from a CDN that is also used for the official WoW downloads. The included realm list has the “official” testing realms in it. The WoW.exe is probably signed, too (didn’t actually check yet).

So, it’s authentic. But what good is it?

You need a sandbox (a minimalized realm server software) to run it and as of now, I don’t think there is anything resembling gameplay. You can run through empty landscapes and check out the new Barrens etc., but no NPCs are where they should be. You can spawn them or morph yourself into them (which is neat – I was Onyxia for a couple minutes) and supposedly you can also play the two new races already. I’d guess the first cease&desist letters are already on their way to whoever is offering sandbox and alpha downloads – so get them while they last (or wait for the final release).

With regards to a release date – my guess would be it will be the usual November release. The Wrath of the Lich King “Friends & Family” alpha version was released on May 20th, 2008 and the game was released on November 13, 2008. Seeing that Cataclysm will have a whole bunch of testing-heavy features (flying in Kalimdor will require very thorough testing due to the geometry changes), I’d presume that pushing the alpha out 3 weeks earlier won’t influence the release of the final game a lot.

See? I can spam, too.

Seriously. A lot of comment spam arrives here, and the vast majority of it are regarding manuals that tell you how to get massive amounts of WoW Gold. Some even claim you can reach Gold Cap (the informal word for the maximum of 214748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper that any one character can hold in their bags) in a mere weeks.

Let me tell you: 99% of these guides are complete and utter crap. From the ones I have seen so far, most are uselessly outdated and consider information that is either completely trivial or just not universally feasible.

An interesting note is that these gold guides are mainly promoted with “affiliate programs” that give the affiliates a higher commission percentage than what the original author earns. This leads to what? Spam, massive amounts of it  – polluting the Google index and my (and other) blog.

This pisses me off. That’s why I’m gonna give you guys a couple tips for free, should you not have them figured out by yourself.

Free WoW Gold Guide

This is a couple things I have seen and done myself, not really rocket science.

As an endgame raider, I spend around 1000 to 2000 gold per week just to keep my character raiding. This money mainly goes into repairs, enchants and gems. Repairs because I’m a tank and I take massive amounts of damage. Also, because my guild does *not* have the Lich King on farm. And because I’m dual-specced with Melee DpS, I can even have two completely broken gear sets in one raid run!

Fortunately, flasks, some gems and fish feast is provided by my guild, but everyone is expected to chip in as much as they can. I do so by submitting mats, the odd gem or other valuables that I have no use for to the guild bank, and by occasionally donating money.

However, if you spend 2k per week, you either have to have an intake of about the same or a large stash hidden somewhere (or pay gold farmers which I do not do). If you’re still levelling, there’s even worse money sinks:

• maxing out the crafting professions costs several K to several 10K per profession
• Flying skills
• Mounts, Flying mounts
• Respeccing to accomodate new abilities
• Dual Spec
• Reenchanting and regemming your gear

However, my tips are from 80s for 80s. I will put a couple tips for alts and newbies later, but wanna jot down my thoughts quick.

Dailies

Do your dailies. Really. They are an awesome source of income and can net you about 400G per day if you play your cards right. I would recommend doing them in the following order:

1. Tournament dailies in Icecrown: These give 10*12 Gold if you still need rep with the major Horde cities, and 10*12 + 4*10 gold if you don’t. That nets you 160 Gold in a playtime of about 20 minutes. If you take a friend, you’ll avoid the hassle of doing TFA (“Threat from Above”) and BBTC (“Battle before the Citadel”) alone. All other quests are soloable and take no more than 15 minutes to finish, excluding flight times.
   Some quests are random, out of a pool of 4 or 5 different dailies. If you get a quest called “Gromok wants his snobolds”, you have to fly to K3 and catch snobolds with a net. There is a daily quest called “Overstock” in K3 that can be done simultaneously with the former one, netting you another 12 Gold basically for free.
2. Dailies in the Storm Peaks (Sons of Hodir): These are equally awesome, since they are all very close to the same quest hub (Dun Niffelhem) and rather quickly done, albeit heavily farmed. Should not be a problem to do them in another 20 minutes if you’re halfway decent geared and not a total idiot. 6 quests, 13 gold each, 78 Gold.
3. Dailies in Zul’Drak: These dailies are actually quite annoying and I don’t do them myself. However, since they are on a timer, you are guaranteed to be done with them in under 20 minutes. Nets 50 gold and extra loot.
4. Fishing daily, cooking daily: usually done in a couple minutes, another 12 - 30 gold (depending on loot from the bag of fishing surprises).
5. Total from dailies: 330 Gold in one hour.

I will update this posting from time to time with other crap that I know.

A recent blue post by Blizzard outlines the changes in the rage system that will occur in Cataclysm. It sounds like yet another complete overhaul and I can only guess if it will be for the better.

Basically, the problems with the current rage system are

a) Rage starvation – you have used up all your rage and have to wait for damage to be done by or to you in order to regain rage. This is especially hard if you’re an off tank who has to maintain a constant high threat level in order to be able to pick off a non-tauntable boss or soak up occasional threat-based damage from a special ability (think Patchwerk in Naxxramas).

b) Next-swing attacks that fail to coherently soak up rage when it is there – if you have Heroic Strike off cooldown and hit it for next swing, you might be out of rage by the time that next swing comes. In my DPS spec, I have this problem with my Fury rotation (Whirlwind, Bloodthirst, Slam if free CD, rinse&repeat) whenever I try to squeeze in an extra Heroic Strike or Cleave.

c) Infinite rage: Warriors, especially tanks, don’t need to manage rage in a boss fight, period. There is not a lot of possibilities to run out of rage if you are tanking a current-level Raid boss. I don’t think this is a problem per se, but I acknowlege the fact that this somehow trivializes gameplay and might be perceived as unfair by DKs (who run out of rune power) and mana classes.

Blizzard will address these problems with a number of mechanic changes.

• Generally, rage generation will be normalized.
• Rage starvation will be fought by new instant rage generation capabilities.
• Haste will improve rage generation. This will hopefully be reflected in loot itemization.
• Crits will generate twice the rage from a normal white attack, currently the factor is lower.
• The whole formula will be revamped to be easier to handle.  The current formula, if I am not wrong, is “rage = damage / (30 + 7*weapon speed)” for main hand crits, with varying factors for main and offhand crits and non-crit damage.

Full blue post after the page break.

We are going to take the opportunity in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the problems with the Rage mechanic for both warriors and druids. Some of these problems include:

• Warriors/druids in the lowest levels of gear can be Rage-starved.
• Warriors/druids in the highest levels of gear no longer have to manage their Rage when it becomes infinite.
• Warrior/druid tanks lose Rage income as they improve their gear and take less damage.
• The gameplay of warrior and druid tanks loses a lot of depth when massive boss hits means never having to manage Rage.
• Heroic Strike and Maul are effective, but tedious abilities for using up extra Rage.
• In general, warriors and druids don’t have enough control over their Rage.

To resolve these issues, Rage will be normalized in Cataclysm. This will make the Rage gained by characters more consistent and avoid drastic differences between low-end and high-end gear.

The concept of normalized Rage may leave a negative impression on some veteran players, as we tried it once before in The Burning Crusade and it wasn’t successful, resulting in them feeling weakened. However, we think that the concept is still sound — it was just that the previous implementation didn’t balance the values correctly, leading to players being Rage-starved. That is not the goal. As part of the change, we want to give warriors and druids a lot of ways to control their rage, so even in the worst-case scenarios they won’t feel like they lack the resource to do their job.

Here are some of the ways the Rage mechanic will change in Cataclysm:

• 
  
  • If the attack is a critical strike, it will generate 200% Rage.
  • Haste will accelerate swing times to generate Rage faster.


1) Rage is no longer generated based on damage done by auto-attacks. Instead, each auto-attack provides a set amount of Rage, and off-hand weapons will generate 50% of the Rage main hands do. This amount is based on a constant formula which factors in the base swing speed of the weapon. This means the Rage gained should be averaged out between fast and slow weapons. The constant formula also gives us the ability to easily increase the rage gained if it feels too low (or reduce it if is too high). We are also implementing the following mechanics, which will still allow rage to improve to some extent as you improve gear:
2) Rage from damage taken will no longer be based on a standard creature of the character’s level, but instead will be based on the health of the warrior or druid. Again, there is a constant that is multiplied by the rage generated in order to allow for fine-tuning. This calculation ignores all damage reduction from armor, absorption, avoidance, block, or similar mechanics, so improving your gear will not reduce Rage gained.

3) We will provide warriors and druids with more instant sources of rage. For example, the warrior shouts are changing to work more like the death knight ability Horn of Winter. Instead of Battle Shout consuming Rage, it will generate Rage but have a short cooldown. Both classes will have additional methods to generate Rage in an emergency or bleed off Rage when they have too much.

4) All “on next swing” attacks in Cataclysm are being removed. Heroic Strike and Maul will be instant swings that cost a variable amount of Rage. For example, imagine Heroic Strike costs between 10 and 30 Rage. You must have at least 10 Rage to use the attack, but it will consume all available Rage up to a maximum of 30. Any Rage consumed above the minimum will cause the ability to hit harder, and in some cases much harder. We will tune the ability so that it’s generally not a good idea to hit it when you have low Rage (unless everything else is somehow on cooldown) but becomes a more attractive button the higher your Rage.

We understand this change may be scary for many players, but keep in mind that the constants in the formulas for gaining Rage will give us the ability to make quick adjustments if we feel Rage generation is too low. Our goal is for each character’s Rage to not be always high or always low, but rather a resource that needs to be managed properly by the player.

The guys and gals at Blizzard have been extraordinarily busy this year, posting April’s fools left and right.
The first one is a slightly redecorated Armory Profile for each character. I turned into a tusken (see screenshot) and the achievement/activity records have been updated to correctly state “Ninjaed loot” on each item.

Then, there is the Neural Interface for WoW in the Blizzard shop. Not so subtle.

The third one is actually funny, because it has a couple nice details and it is very close to the truth (if you take addons like GearScore into account): WoW Equipment Potency check. Technically, it’s all there – the phasing technology (as used for example in Icecrown for people who haven’t done the Ebon Blade questlines) allows to selectiveley show or hide content (although currently no terrain, I think, but this will change with Cataclysm) according to the player’s status. Item levels determine how “powerful” an item is and can be mapped to a numerical bar. And: check the items that are looted on the screen shots.

A new downloadable add-on for Assassin’s Creed 2 just came out last night (for PS3, at least). It features an additional “Sequence” or mission, “The Battle for Forli”. From the trailer (see below), it looks like a nice new opportunity to use Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine and it is probably well worth the € 3.99 that are charged in the EU.

Das nächste Add-On für World of Warcraft wirft seine Schatten voraus. Jetzt ist es möglich, “World of Warcraft: Cataclysm” bei Amazon vorzubestellen:

Einige Produktinfos gibts auch schon:

• Zwei neue spielbare Völker: Begebt euch als Mitglied eines der zwei neuen Völker ins Abenteuer – als verfluchte Worgen in der Allianz oder als einfallsreiche Goblins in der Horde.
• Maximalstufe auf 85 erhöht: Lernt neue Fähigkeiten, macht euch neue Talente zunutze und schreitet voran durch das Pfadsystem, einem neuen Weg für Spieler, ihre Charaktere an ihre individuellen Wünschen anzupassen.
• Die Gebiete der Classic-Version sind neu gestaltet: Bekannte Gebiete auf den ursprünglichen Kontinenten Kalimdor und die östlichen Königreiche sind für immer verändert und mit neuem Inhalt gefüllt – vom verwüsteten Ödland bis hin zum zerbrochenen Brachland, welches entzweigerissen wurde.
• Neue Bereiche für hohe Stufen: Erforscht neu geöffnete Teile der Welt, inklusive Uldum, Grim Batol und die großartige versunkene Stadt Vashj’ir unter der Meeresoberfläche.
• Mehr Inhalte für Schlachtzüge als jemals zuvor: Genießt mehr Inhalte für hochstufige Schlachtzüge als in vorherigen Erweiterungen, mit optionalen, herausfordernderen Versionen für alle Bosskämpfe.
• Neue Volks- und Klassenkombinationen: Erforscht Azeroth als Gnomenpriester, Blutenelfenkrieger oder als eine der anderen, nun erstmals möglichen Volks- und Klassenkombinationen.
• Gildenentwicklung. Macht als Gilde Fortschritte, um mit der Gilde den Stufenaufstieg zu erreichen und Gildenerfolge zu schaffen.
• Neue PvP-Zone & gewertete Schlachtfelder: Verfolgt PvP-Ziele und nehmt tägliche Quests auf der Insel Tol Barad an, der neuen Tausendwinter-ähnlichen Zone, und schlagt Schlachten auf komplett neuen Schlachtfeldern.
• Archäologie: Meistert eine neue sekundäre Fertigkeit, um wertvolle Artefakte zu bergen und einzigartige Belohungen zu erhalten.
• Fliegende Reittiere in Azeroth: Erforscht Kalimdor und die östlichen Königreiche wie nie zuvor. Und vieles, vieles mehr..

(Quelle: amazon.de)

There’s a new Wow armory feature – link to your char in 3D. Very neat. Check me out:

So I’m back on the WoW train… collecting new gear through badges (I have, I think now 6 different reward badge currencies) and instances.

I really have to say that this game got MUCH more accessible in the level 80 region through the new dungeon finder. It’s dead easy to find a group for anything all the time since the dungeon pick-up groups are shared within the battlegroup (that is the number of realms sharing one PVP system). For doing random dungeons, you get 2 additional badges per go, which is very nice too.

I guess that, after doing my daily quest chores, I will start doing just one ore two random heroics per day (which would amount to about an hour of playtime) to get back into raiding by maybe february.