Thursday, June 19, 2014

Alpha News and Thoughts 6.19

For those of you not following me on Twitter and possibly wondering where I've been, well I've been really busy. On top of that, instead of blogging during most of my free time, I've been (thanks to GoblinRaset) invited to the WoD Alpha, and I've been testing it out for about a week now. Since there's been a decent amount of radio silence on my end I figured I'd post some of my thoughts of the current Alpha and what we need to be watching moving forward.

General Updates
So there have been some Alpha updates, the most interesting for us being about a week ago. Lots of the latest updates have been class tweaks, but there are some gold making items that were added that we should be focusing on a bit.

Inscription
There were some general updates to inscription, namely all of the research spells have been removed and replaced by these spells instead. This will allow for quicker learning of non-trainer glyphs.  Right now I'm not going to comment on it, but check out Elen's (El from El's Angling) post on this on the Consortium Forums. There's not much I can add there.

Joker's Wild
Added to the most recent build are cards like Moon Joker. The Joker card behaves almost as you would expect it to, you can exchange it at the Darkmoon Faire for any card in it's deck (Moon is a deck). This is an interesting change, but keep in mind that it has an equal spawn rate to any of the other cards, so the Joker itself will also be very rare, but a great mechanism to take the RNG out of DMF cards. To me it will reduce the overall gating of the DMF cards, which would also reduce profits, but it opens up some new possibilities in Inscription that I think will majorly be a quality of life fix for most Scribes.

Big Vendor Bags
The last bit on the News side is the addition of the Gronnskin Bag. This is a 28 slot bag that has a sell price of 550g, implying it's likely that it's sold by a vendor (probably not in Alpha yet) for 2200g. Now, if the price doesn't go up, it definitely will effect the bag market. On the other hand things stacking to 200 will largely make bigger bags unnecessary, but realistically, we all enjoy that extra space.

Phat's Impressions
So I've been actually playing on the Alpha server, and I've enjoyed the Alpha thus far, and look forward to learning more. Garrisons are strongly intertwined to the questing experience. Every single quest line and rare spawn you find while questing rewards Garrison Resources, and the storyline keeps bringing you back to your garrison to build and fortify. What I'm trying to say is Garrisons aren't alt friendly. Gone are the days of leveling a toon to 85 just to take max professions and do a CD every day, it's just not going to happen. This video will show you what I mean, it's pretty short, just a peek into Alchemy/Garrison involvement (currently only the alch building is REMOTELY testable as far as prof buildings). Note that you'll need to use your garrison going to get your recipes:


Again, keep in mind it's early alpha. The mechanism to get the tokens to buy recipes isn't in game, but Elen (from above) has suggested in a separate thread that they come from Alchemy follower quests, not yet in Alpha. Now the one saving grace is that once you get the tome to learn 700 professions (only in Draenor), you will be able to craft the CDs, and for Alchemy at the very least, they're not soulbound! This may provide some relief for alts, but that's yet to be found. Otherwise alpha has been fun and buggy, and I can honestly say I enjoyed the questline and building up what little I can of my Garrison. Be sure to follow my blog to keep up with Garrison news going forward!


Cheers,
Phat Lewts

@PhatLewtsGold
  PhatLewtsGold

1 comment:

  1. hi , the mechanics are different for the proffesions but it still looks great for the game play.

    ReplyDelete

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