Marcus McCurdy's Blog

As I mentioned in my last post about the huge crits with the new Death Knight Scourge Strike I have a brand new video that shows a monstrous crit of 6907 against the 64 elite Deathskitterer in The Bone Wastes.

Without further ado here is that video:

I signed on to Wrath of the Lich King this morning and had to download a 488 MB patch. I was eager to check out all the changes, but for some reason the patch notes are several builds behind so I have no idea what has been changed.
As soon as I logged in I noticed I had an available talent point so I check out my talents and noticed in the Unholy tree that scourge strike had been changed. Previously, it was exactly the same as Plague Strike, but did all the damage as Shadow Damage vice physical damage. Now, it has been buffed to extreme levels.
I was fighting some same level mobs in Zangarmarsh and I my normal hits were around 2K+ with crits getting as high as 5.2K!

To me, this seems to be a bit too powerful now. The only way this wouldn’t be over powered is if there is only one rank of this spell. 5.2K crits at 80 probably won’t be very noteworthy, but at level 63 it pretty much tags out any non-elite mobs I’m fighting.

I’ll update this post with some screen shots later today after I do some more testing.

update: Here is a video of Scourge strike doing 2.7K

[photo via flickr]

Last night, I wanted to see if I could solo Boglash in Zanagermarsh on my Death Knight and I decided to record it. Well, I soloed him very easily as you can see in the video. I don’t think my HP dropped below 75%. Sorry for the poor quality of the video I dropped my resolution down because I didn’t realize Fraps increased its max recording resolution. Anyway, I’ll record and post some more videos later.

Sorry to update so long after my last post, but after the beta client finished downloading I had to download about 5 patches with some of them being in the 500 MB range. Anyway, I did finally get a chance to play and I dove right into the new Death Knight class. I was contemplating how Blizzard would handle the creation of a new Death Knight because they start at level 55. I had many questions about equipment, talents, and professions. I was pleasantly surprised by how Blizzard handle it.

New starting zone

Upon creation of your Death Knight you enter an all new zone filled with Death Knight specific quests. You initial start out with 0 talent points. However, each Death Knight specific quest that you complete will award you experience points, gold, a (useful) blue item, and 1 or more bonus talent points. The quests take you from 55 to level 58 and are actually quite fun. I’m glad Blizzard did this set of introductory quests because I was dreading trudging through old content to level up my new Death Knight. You also start with a high level of first aid which is very cool.

New Quest types

There are two quests in the new zone that really caught my eye. In one of them, you sneak aboard a ship in the harbor and then control the cannons on the ship and turn them against the Argent Dawn. In the other quest Arthas has you climb aboard a Frost Wyrm and slaughter Argent Dawn troops. This was similar to a bombing quest except you completely control the dragon and have to dodge flaming arrows from archers and ballistas on the ground.

Interface changes

One of the biggest interface changes I noticed is the addition of a calendar right next to the mini-map. It shows all the upcoming Blizzard events and I would imagine it would be integrated with your guild although I haven’t been able to confirm this since I don’t have a guild in the beta. The options menu has been completely revamped as well, which I think is a great improvement. I also noticed an additional panel called glyphs that is attached to the spell book, but I’m not sure what that is about yet.

Death Knight

In PvE the Death Knight feels very over powered to me. I haven’t been involved in any PvP yet, but in nearly all my PvE encounters I end the battle with full health and slaughter pretty much everything I come across. It is nice not having to worry about mana or rage. Play style feels a little bit like a warrior or pally. However, unlike a warrior who starts out with zero rage you have your runes to start so you can frontload quite a bit of damage.

I choose to go down the blood talent tree as it seemed to be the best for PvE leveling. It seems pretty good so far, but I haven’t played enough with it to know for sure. I also haven’t done any analyitics on talents or skill rotations to see what kind of DPS the DK is really putting out.

I’ll be sure to post more updates as I get some more play time in. I didn’t get much time to play last night because a new 600+ MB patch was released that took quite a while to download and then install.

I expected to get presents today since it is my birthday, but I got one present that was totally unexpected. As you can probably guess from the title of my post I received an invite to the WotLK beta from Blizzard. Currently, my download of the client is 98% so I’ll post some more info about the Death Knight as soon as I have the beta client installed.

According to this post at Shacknews not only is Blizzard working on Wrath of the Lich King, Diablo III, and Starcraft II, but they are also working on a 4th yet to be announced next gen MMO. The internet is buzzing with speculation as to what this 4th title could be with many people hoping (and praying) that it will be World of Starcraft. At first, I thought this would be a bad move for Blizzard, but then the more I thought about it the better the idea started to sound. (more…)

I’m so excited for this game I can’t even describe it. I was just starting to get bored with all other games as of late. It seems like developers try to pack in so many gimmicks and crazy graphics that they forget about a good story with excellent game play. (more…)

A friend’s Wii was having issues only with the new Smash Bros and he tried another disc and had the same issue. I was asking some of my contacts about it and a friend pointed me to this link and here is what Nintendo has to say:

Super Smash Bros. Brawl utilizes a double-layer disc which has a large memory capacity. A very small percentage of Wii consoles may have trouble consistently reading data off this large capacity disc if there is some contamination on the lens of the disc drive. Nintendo has specialized cleaning equipment that can resolve this problem. (Please do NOT attempt to clean the lens yourself, as you may damage the system.)

Unfortunately, you have to send your Wii in for repair, which stinks, but is better than buying a whole new Wii or just not playing SSBB. I’m not sure about the shipping because you have to fully fill out the form before they present you with the shipping options so if anyone has tried it out I would be interested in finding out about it. Please leave a comment if you have had success with this process.