Click to enlarge (its pretty big)

Reforging has landed on the US servers and is due to land tomorrow on the EU. This is going to be a short and sweet guide on the user interface for reforging. I’ll stick up some images of the interface and breakdown the concepts and uses of reforging.

Lets start off with the concepts. Reforging allows you to change one minor stat on any item of equipment you have. By minior stat I mean secondary stats such as hit rating, haste etc. It allows you to swap 40% of any secondary stat for another secondary stat. The process of reforging is done by NPC’s in capital cities. Just ask a guard if you want to find out where they are hiding!  Its going to be great to finally get rid of all that bloody unwanted hit rating.

Check out the screenshots of the user interface for reforging after the break.

We will be performing extended maintenance on Tuesday, October 12th. Maintenance will begin at 12:00 AM PDT and conclude at approximately 12:00 PM PDT. During this time, all realms and many web services will be unavailable.

Thank you for your patience.

Rishgur

Its official people, World of Warcraft’s third expansion, Cataclysm is launching on December 7th 2010. Only two months to go! Blue post after the break.

IRVINE, Calif., Oct 04, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) – Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced that World of Warcraft(R): Cataclysm(TM), the highly anticipated third expansion for the world’s most popular subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game*, will be released starting on December 7, 2010. The expansion will be available on DVD-ROM for Windows(R) XP/Windows Vista(R)/Windows(R) 7 and Macintosh(R) at a suggested retail price of $39.99 and will also be offered as a digital download from the Blizzard Store. A special Collector’s Edition packed with bonus items will be available exclusively in retail stores for a suggested retail price of $79.99.

“Cataclysm includes the best content we’ve ever created for World of Warcraft. It’s not just an expansion, but a re-creation of much of the original Azeroth, complete with epic new high-level adventures for current players and a redesigned leveling experience for those just starting out,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “With the help of our beta testers, we’re putting on the final polish, and we look forward to welcoming gamers around the world to enjoy it in just a couple of months.”

The first two World of Warcraft expansions, The Burning Crusade(R) and Wrath of the Lich King(R), each shattered PC game sales records upon their release.* In Cataclysm, the face of Azeroth will be forever altered by the return of the corrupted Dragon Aspect Deathwing. Players will explore once-familiar areas of the world that have now been reshaped by the devastation and filled with new adventures. In an effort to survive the planet-shattering cataclysm, two new playable races – worgen and goblins – will join the struggle between the Alliance and the Horde. As players journey to the new level cap of 85, they’ll discover newly revealed locations, acquire new levels of power, and come face to face with Deathwing in a battle to determine the fate of the world.

The beta test for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is currently underway. Visit the official Battle.net(R) website at http://www.battle.net to set up a Battle.net account and sign up for a chance to participate. To learn more about World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, visithttp://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm.

Thanks to our friendly neighbourhood crab, hit scaling in Cataclysm is now looking a lot less confusing and mysterious than it once was. In a recent conversation on the forums, Ghostcrawler gave a detailed look at the hit scaling, explaining how characters get more powerful, and how boss levels work. It would appear that bosses get more powerful as the raid tiers go up. That way, players chase a new hit cap with each new tier in raiding.

It’s a neat way of doing things. By the time the Lich King fell many raiders were swimming in hit when they simply didn’t need it. The hit cap never increased, but the amount of hit on gear did. The system coming into play in Cataclysm should stop the same thing happening again.

Ghostcrawler’s posts are available for all to see here:

Consider this series of boots:

Level 83 quest blues with 10 attack power, 10 Stamina, 10 crit, 10 hit, 10 parry.
Level 85 quest blues with 12 attack power, 12 Stamina, 12 crit, 12 hit, 12 parry.
Level 85 tier 1 raid with 14 attack power, 14 Stamina, 14 crit, 14 hit, 14 parry.
Level 85 tier 2 raid with 16 attack power, 16 Stamina, 16 crit, 16 hit, 16 parry.

When yo go from level 83 to level 85 you stay at the same amount of power relative to creatures. Why? Because the creatures are gaining levels. Their health goes up, so you need that extra AP. Their damage goes up, so you need that extra health. Your chance to crit and hit and parry them goes down, so you need those stats as well.

So far, so good.

When you start raiding, the bosses are level 88. This makes them a little harder to hit and everything, so you need that extra budget on your gear to keep up. Still not a problem.

Now let’s look at the final piece of gear. You’re going from a tier 1 raid to a tier 2 raid. The boss hits harder so you need that health. The boss has more health, so you need that attack power. But the boss is still level 88 like he was in tier 1. This means you crit him more than the previous boss, because your crit went up. You do more damage to the harder boss than to the easier boss. You also hit him more (unless you’re hit capped, which you probably are) and you parry him more.

We solved, in an awkward way, the parry problem in Icecrown by putting a debuff on you. That basically allowed the creatures to scale with your gear. We couldn’t solve the crit or hit problems, so players just became more and more powerful and eventually capped those stats (or got close to it in the case of crit). Just as players are often very worried (and sometimes rightfully so) about not scaling with gear, the bosses were not scaling with your gear. All of those problems that can happen to players when their damage (or healing or tanking) don’t scale were happening to the bosses. You were scaling too well with crit, hit and parry.

A different way to go would be that the tier 2 raid boss is actually level 89 or 90 instead of level 88. Then you’d naturally need more crit and hit and parry to face him. That makes intuitive sense, but it does some weird things to our game because creature levels were never intended to be used that way. For example, the boss would get crushing blows and resists. Even worse, it does weird things to the next tier of content. If Deathwing at the end of Cataclysm (spoiler!) is a level 93 boss, then what is the first boss at the end of the next expansion? Level 93? Level 90? Level 96?

Instead, we are just faking the bosses gaining levels. We haven’t worked out the exact mechanic yet, but imagine they are level 88++ or level 88.3 or level 88 SKULL SKULL BAD SKULL. As you get more powerful and get better gear, they get more powerful… exactly like all those bosses you handled while leveling up. Rather than critting and hitting the more dangerous opponents more often, your relative power stays about the same. You scale.

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That goes straight to customer satisfaction and longevity of the game. The more you play, the more powerful you should become. Not the weaker.

You do get more powerful. You get more powerful in an absolute sense, but not in a relative sense, because the challenges you can face become more powerful too. It is a fundamental pillar of RPG design othat as you get more powerful, you are able to handle more powerful opponents. Games lose their steam pretty quickly if you become more powerful and just use that power to steamroll the same weak opponents. Where is the glory in that?

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Hit will never be an interesting stat as long as there’s a hard cap on it.

I know this is an old argument, but this is *why* we think hit is an interesting stat. If you could just stack hit forever, you probably would, because it’s a very good stat. Some of the biggest decisions to be made about gearing come when you have to engineer enough but not too much of this one stat so that you can focus on the others. We want you to look at stats other than just ilevel. Otherwise, we might as well just give all the armor and weapons a power stat, and you just pick whichever has the most power. Hit keeps you from just stacking your best stat. Maybe it doesn’t add a ton of depth to say “stack hit, then stack your best stat” but it does add some.

I can’t believe we missed this one.

mmo-champion reported a couple days back that it believes the launch date for Cataclysm is the first week of November.  November 2nd to be exact.

This is not a blind guess either, we know they have certain ‘contacts’ shall we say.  They however do state that this is in line with the outlined plan for pre Cataclysm events.  That being the next part of the pre Cataclysm event will most likely happen in around 2-4 weeks time.