Blizzard Immortalizes Beta Testers and Other News

Kenzi September 23 2008 4:45 pm 8 Comments

We’ve seen Blizzard adding it’s players to the game many times. The most notable one is of course Ezra Phoenix Chatterton. We’ve also seen Breanni from WarCraftPets.com added as a NPC in Dalaran. Recently beta tester and DKinfo member Jayde was found in a WotLK quest as a NPC helper and now Blizzard took the beta tester appreciation one step further with quest gear named after notable beta testers, including Jayde.

The quest is The Air Stands Still and rewards four different items featureing beta tester names:

Spend your honor points before WotLK release!

Eyonix
As many of you know we will be featuring a new Battleground, a dedicated world PvP zone and all new PvP items in Wrath of the Lich King. In order to make the transition from The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King flow as smoothly as possible, all accrued honor points will be reset at the launch of the expansion. We do this to ensure select players do not have an unfair advantage at level 80 from stockpiling honor to instantly purchase the newest Wrath of the Lich King PvP rewards. For those with unspent honor points prior to the release of the expansion, we will be offering a few upgrades and special rewards in next content patch solely for purchase via the honor system.

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The items should be on the PTRs now, or very soon.

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Marks of Honor will be wiped as well

PVP, Death Knights too strong now? Yeah, Nerf Incoming.

Ghostcrawler
We’re starting to get a lot of PvP data in, and several classes are having trouble beating rogues, Frost mages, Ret paladins and death knights.

Death knights have a lot of options at the moment, which is cool, but makes it really hard for another player to catch a break and burn a death knight down. So we’re going to try some changes. I won’t sugar-coat it — these are nerfs.

– The ghoul is doing too much damage. He is receiving 100% of death knight strength, which is much higher than most pets.
– Chains of Ice is going back to be being dispellable. It is probably the best snare in the game at the moment, for a class that already has Death Grip.
– The same is true of both Strangulate and Mind Freeze. Strangulate’s cooldown is going to go up. Mind Freeze remains the quick interrupt.
– We’re increasing the cooldown on Anti-Magic Shell. We don’t think this will hurt DKs in PvE much, and it still leaves you with Icebound Fortitude to use often.

As always, if we overdid it, if DKs are now too weak in PvP, we’ll adjust. But we were at the point where we weren’t getting a lot of good numbers because some fights were just over too quickly.

Spread the DK:

8 Comments »

goatman said:

damnit wiped honor i wonder what the items will be

# 23 September 2008 at 5:46 pm

Virty said:

wow grats again Jayde and it sucks that even the marks are being reset

# 23 September 2008 at 6:26 pm

Dark Might said:

Grats on the fame, Jayde & company.

# 23 September 2008 at 11:33 pm

Vampus said:

GAY. If Beta entrance was not based upon pot luck, this would rock, but honestly, it’s a ripoff to the 95% of players out there who were never given a chance. Blizzard should have awarded some PTR testers with these awards, not those who were already lucky as hell just to get into beta.

For the record, I am in beta, but I still think this is a massive ripoff.

# 24 September 2008 at 1:42 am

dadish said:

Again PVE suffers because of PVP. :( An ability that is fine in PVE is a bit overpowered in PVP then it gets nerfed in both aspects. I wished they would separate PVP/PVE completely.

# 24 September 2008 at 3:31 am

Raekwyn said:

That they are wiping honor and marks is perfectly fine – it would be lame to just grind up 75k honor and 100 of each marks and just buy all the fresh lvl 80 pvp gear once lvl 80 is achieved.

# 24 September 2008 at 7:28 am

Vampus said:

It would also be lame to let players save up 20,000 gold and just buy the new special vendor items. Good thing that’s what’s happening though. It means that PVP currency gets wiped while PVE currency stays intact.

It’s not going to personally affect me, but on principal, wiping honor without wiping gold is a flawed move.

# 24 September 2008 at 1:15 pm

Antonicus [Bloodscalp] said:

It’s unfortunate that they already see fit to nerf the DK class before people have enven had time to learn their abilities and skills to counter them. Just because it’s new and people aren’t used to it, shouldn’t have to see it fit to lessen their abilities. Same for Paladins, they should just let it ride and have people learn to adjust to change. -ANT