Filed under: Wrath of the Lich King

EU players will be happy to know that for the seventh anniversary of World of Warcraft in Europe, Blizzard has slashed the price of World of Warcraft yet again, bringing the cost of WoW down even lower for a limited time. Remember, United States and assorted North American nations, these are EU copies and versions of the game.

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- lowering the cost of the barrier to entry to WoW is not a choice but rather a grave necessity. When 90 levels starts looking like a lot of content and too big of an endeavor for a new player, it doesn't matter how good the 85-to-90 content is, because people will never see it. The last thing you want is for price to be an issue when there are so many other factors to consider about the relative uniqueness of the MMO industry.

Here are the EU seventh anniversary sale prices:

• World of Warcraft Battle Chest EUR 7,49 £4.99
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King EUR 9,99 £7.49
• World of Warcraft: Cataclysm EUR 14,99 £12.49
• World of Warcraft mount: Celestial Steed mount EUR 10,00 £8.50
• World of Warcraft pet: Lil'K.T. EUR 5,00 £4.50

Hit up the EU Blizzard store to get these deals while they last.

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Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!

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It's very hard to imagine a Cataclysm without legendary items. Despite the fact that it wasn't introduced until six months into the game's existence, Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest has become a staple item in every progression raiding guild's repetoire. The Fangs of the Father, Golad and Tiriosh, have only recently started to actually appear in game, but every week from now on will see more and more being finished.

Coming hand in hand with these legendary items are the issues of imbalance that they cause. In PvE, terminology has started to crop up that puts legendary and non-legendary DPS into two separate categories of competitiveness. Concepts exist such as "enhancement shaman are currently one of the top non-legendary DPS specs..." -- a category that encompasses only 10 of the 22 DPS classes in the game. In PvP, concerns about burst damage have arisen, which was a big factor in the nerf to DTR that came in 4.3.

The issues with legendaries

Legendaries cause a balance problem, and that's a problem that's been exacerbated by two things in Cataclysm: a horrifically wide spread of specs that can use them, with 12 specs or five classes in total having access to legendary weapons right now, and incredible ease of access to legendaries (for the heroic raider).

Kaivax hit the forums to answer a player's question about Ulduar and talk about the fondness the dungeon has retained amongst the playerbase and where the optional boss modes have gone. Back during the first half of Wrath of the Lich King, "choose your own difficulty" encounters and in-fight hard mode triggers were staples of the encounters in Ulduar and the Obsidian Sanctum. When Trial of the Crusader launched, Blizzard implemented the UI-based difficulty toggle. Players have expressed desire to return to the old days, feeling that the toggle method is just too robotic when encounters could be designed around cool difficulty-swap mechanics. In his post, Kaivax hints that the design teams are thinking about bringing back these mechanics for some fights in the upcoming expansion, Mists of Pandaria.

Rather than selecting a normal or hard mode toggle before pulling an encounter, Ulduar raid groups were tasked with completing different objectives during the encounter or defeating the boss mechanics in a different order to activate hard mode. Famously, players would press a large red button behind Mimiron labelled "DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON," activating the encounter and a rather angry Titanic watcher. Other fights during Wrath of the Lich King such as Freya and Sartharion featured a "choose your own difficulty" mechanic wherein the player's choices before the encounter increased or decreased the boss' overall difficulty. Harder combinations of abilities would yield more impressive items.

Will Mists of Pandaria bring back our beloved "choose your difficulty" encounters and in-fight hard mode triggers? I know I'd like to get another Sartharion-style encounter, especially with mount rewards like the original provided.

Read the full blue post behind the break below.

Hi, I'm Ol' Grumpy. You may remember me from such posts as every single other post with "Ol' Grumpy" in the title. Today, since I have this incredibly uncomfortable rocking chair to sit on, I figured I'd grump about class quests and why I think they should come back.

Back in the day (that day being 2004 to 2005), I leveled the first of many warriors to the experience cap of level 60. At that time, one of the things that set the warrior class (and other classes) apart was a long, involved quest line that sent you all over Azeroth to gather materials and finally face and defeat Cyclonian. As a result, you gained one of three iconic weapons. (Most people took the axe. As a human at the time, I took the sword.) This extremely long quest line took you from Fray Island to the area north of Tarren Mill and then to Arathi Highlands (giving them a reason to exist) and Stranglethorn Vale before bringing you back to face Cyclonian. It was a rite of passage for a leveling toon. As a 60th-level, 70th-level and then an 80th-level warrior, I would often go back and help warriors on the quest to defeat Cyclonian, who posed an extreme challenge to anyone attempting to solo him.

I lamented the removal of class-specific quests at the time it was announced. Now, over a year later, I still think removing them was a mistake. Being soaked in ancient wisdom like a turkey soaked in ancient wisdom, here are my reasons.

Blizzard has just announced permanent price cuts to the Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm expansions in the EU for 2012. What seems to be a push for easier accessibility to WoW, Wrath now costs only €19.99, down from €34.99 and Cataclysm is now €29.99, down from €34.99. Whether or not these deals are coming to the United States is not known at this time, but I can't really understand why they wouldn't. Getting your WoW account up to date has never been cheaper, and Blizzard is making sure the barrier to entry is as low as possible for new players.

Permanent price cuts for WoW expansions in 2012

Great news for all Blizzard fans! From today, our latest games are available at retail and on the Blizzard Store at new, permanently low prices. You can now get Wrath of the Lich King for a mere €19.99 and Cataclysm for just €29.99. There's never been a better time to grab the games you might have missed out on before. Just click here and celebrate the New Year by taking advantage of our new reduced prices. Still don´t have World of Warcraft? Now you can get the full game and all expansions for cheaper than ever before.

Want to check out StarCraft II? If you haven't yet taken advantage of our great new price for StarCraft II, you can click here to get yours right away!

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Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!

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GameStop has announced a brand new bundle online that gets you World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King all for just $19.99. We don't know when the World of Warcraft Battlechest combo bundle is going to expire, but for now, customers who purchase the Battlechest from GameStop will get a copy of Wrath bundled along for free. The deals don't get much better than this, folks.

Many people, myself included, believe that WoW's barrier to entry is perhaps one of its most difficult challenges to overcome. With more deals like this, WoW can get into more hands at a lower price than ever before, hopefully adding on subscribers and new blood in anticipation of Mists of Pandaria.

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Guys, I don't know if you know this, but we have just pried the elementium plates off of the back of a dragon so big 25 people can stand on him. After that, we killed the mutant kaiju version of him, who was so big his head alone was bigger than us and four other giant dragons.

I'm sorry, but you have to be 50 kinds of jaded to not enjoy this. One of the things I've really enjoyed about patch 4.3 and the Dragon Soul raid is how it unabashedly throws massive, crazy, world-ending doomsday events at you. Between fending off not one but two faceless ones from within bloated abominations, balking an ancient earth elemental giant at the base of Wyrmrest Temple, and defeating Ultraxion and then taking on Deathwing himself, the fights feel enormous. The stakes are huge, and while the supposed saviors of Azeroth spend a lot of time thinking really hard at a McGuffin, we step the heck up.

Whether you are hitting it via Raid Finder, attending your weekly 10-man hardcore raid, or participating as a member of a casual 25-man raid alliance (or anything in between), in terms of pure aesthetics, Dragon Soul is a very satisfying raid in terms of pure scope and sweep.

With the release of the Raid Finder and the recent changes to valor points, the debate about 10- vs. 25-man raiding, which is harder to run, and which is harder to balance rages on. I have friends on both sides of the 10/25 debate. I understand both points of view, and I think both are utterly wrong. Completely, absolutely wrong. The issue to me is when we went from 40-man raids down to the current raid sizes, the decision to offer 25-man raids didn't really work. I think we should have gone to 10- and 20-man raiding at the dawn of The Burning Crusade, and I still think we should.

We had 20-man raids back in classic WoW -- two of them, in fact, Zul'Gurub and Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. Neither exists as a 20-man raid any more, so this may seem odd to players who didn't raid then, but these were considered the small raids. People who had just spent hours raiding in Molten Core, Blackwing Lair or AQ40 would put together these runs on the fly to gear their alts or get a shot at off-spec loot, while other guilds that didn't have the numbers for 40-man raids would spend their time raiding these while trying to build up their numbers.

Hello again, everybody. I'm Ol' Grumpy. You might remember me from such posts as Ol' Grumpy and the Goblet of Firelands adjustments or Ol' Grumpy's guide to outdated content and you. This time, we're going to be talking about what gear inflation is, how it happens, and why something eventually has to be done about it.

Gear inflation has actually been a concern of mine since about halfway through Wrath of the Lich King's expansion cycle. Back then, it was armor penetration that really set off my gear inflation warning bells, a stat that's since gone the way of the dodo. If you remember ArP, you remember that it start acting extremely weird at higher gear levels and often had to be adjusted and capped to keep it from doing things like reducing target armor into the negative.

In essence, for a brief period after Ulduar dropped, ArP could actually cause your target to have negative armor values so that their damage taken was increased by a percentage instead of just reduced by a percentage. This was very wonky. It was quickly capped and the stat adjusted. But by ICC levels of gear, it was possible again to reach 100% ArP, and doing so was absolutely your best bet as a melee DPS.

Now, let's be honest: Gear inflation is the inevitable by-product of a game where one increases in power via leveling and gaining new gear. It must happen. If you simply look at gear from original World of Warcraft's 1 to 60 game, you'll see that gear steadily increases in power and that raid gear from MC to BWL/AQ and to the now-vanished Naxxramas-40 steadily increases in power. Indeed, Naxx-40 gear was such an upgrade in power that it was roughly as strong as blue drops from level 70 instances. You could raid Karazhan in Naxx-40 gear. The Burning Crusade dealt with gear inflation differently than its successors did because it could.

My personal opinion on the Cataclysm expansion varied greatly as the expansion unfolded. At different points in the expansion, I was very negative, slightly negative, then outright positive about it as an experience. A recent thread on the forums discussing the overall view of Cataclysm as a failed expansion drew Nethaera's commentary, and frankly I think what she has to say is worth discussing. I agree with a lot of it, disagree with some, but think it's valuable to look at where the design intent in the examination of the expansion is going.

Nethaera

You are mistaking the developers looking at the game with a critical eye with the claim that it was a "failure". We've seen a wide spectrum of opinions over Cataclysm and we're not afraid to look at what worked and didn't work (as we do with each expansion and game as a whole) and try to find better ways of doing things. I heard differing opinions overall during BlizzCon, but not once did I get the impression that any of those opinions boiled down to "Cataclysm sucks" as a whole. They had key elements that they disliked or thought could be improved on, but throwing the whole thing out the window as a "failure" is and should be considered a bit extreme don't you think?

As always, we want to keep learning and growing from each iteration of the game and that means that we're going to do that by continuing to look for your constructive feedback as well.

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The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

The full questing experience in Wrath of the Lich King was vast. Levels 70 to 80, with quests for every zone, instance, and even raid instance, was quite possibly the most complicated total questing experience ever designed for World of Warcraft. Add in the death knight starting experience and the patches that each brought in new content, and you're looking at a real achievement in quest design. Wrath of the Lich King was indisputably the crucible in which Cataclysm's 1-to-60 quest redesign was forged, and it absolutely gave the lie to the misguided idea that the quest design team was somehow coasting on the achievements of the game's original launch.

We talked last week about how questing in Wrath worked up to the "first act" of the Wrathgate and Battle for Undercity, and then we looked at Ulduar and how it managed to integrate a very divergent lore element into the expansion. This week, we'll discuss the Lich King in more detail and how he functioned as a device to get the players involved.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Wrath of the Lich King is where the current paradigm for quests in World of Warcraft took full shape. Whether you played Horde or Alliance, you got to experience the events of Wrath from an entirely new perspective than questing had ever managed before. Even though there were still (and always probably will be) quests asking players to gather random amounts of (as an example) meat for stews or cannonballs, these quests were supplementary in nature.

The big-draw quests were elaborate chains that revealed lore about the world and the threat that it was now under. The Lich King's attacks on Orgrimmar and Stormwind during the events leading up to the expansion were bait in a subtle trap aimed at bringing players to Northrend. That's right: The Lich King attacked your cities entirely to get you sent to him. You. The player characters were the front and center reasons for everything. The Lich King desired nothing less than the finest heroes the Horde and Alliance had to offer, and that's exactly who they sent.

How did questing reflect this?

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

They are the fists of the Warchief, whoever he is. They are the sworn honor guard, the advance force, the first into the fray and the last to leave. They are Kor'kron. What other forces in the Horde can aspire to be they have already been. Since the founding of Orgrimmar, they have advanced the cause of the Horde anywhere the battle has been joined, fighting against Illidan's forces in Shadowmoon Valley, pushing against the Lich King in Northrend, throwing the traitorous Varimathras back to the pit in Undercity. Now you can find them seeking to drive the humans into the sea on the new islands near Vashj'ir or fighting the Twilight's Hammer in the Highlands.

They are Kor'kron. They know only victory or death. Their loyalty is absolute.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Frankly, I wrote a serious post this week about tanking that you may want to read. As a result of that post, however, and previous week's posts for this column that were fairly weighty, I find myself desperately wanting to shift gears. While considering a beginner's guide to PVP and a beginner's guide to leveling as DPS, I realized that I've played this game for years and collected a lot of gear over that time. With the announcement of transmogrification in patch 4.3, it's finally time to discuss a few truths.

1. Warriors have had some of the best-looking gear in the game.
2. We're finally going to be able to use whichever pieces of gear we want.
3. I want to talk about sweet-looking gear.

By these forces combined, I am Captain Clotheshorse. So I've dusted out the ol' trusty model viewer and I'm going to talk about gear you may want for your warrior's transmog needs. Like, for instance, the Whirlwind Axe. One of three weapons awarded to a warrior for doing the pre-Cataclysm level 30 to 40 warrior quest chain, the one that ended with Death to Cyclonian. If you didn't roll your warrior before Cata or deleted the weapon, fret not; there are several weapons with the same model.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Okay, so you leveled as protection. Let's assume you intend to tank on said warrior. Since you're now level 85, it follows that you should look up what the top raiding tanks are doing and do that, yes?

No.

Sweet candy-coated Garrosh clusters, no, you should not do that. Those guys are wearing gear you haven't even started to collect and are in 10- or 25-man raids that are composed of some of the best players in the world. You're just starting. You're most likely going to be tanking in pickup groups where the other four players are complete strangers who neither know you nor care one whit about your gameplay. In some cases, sure, you'll get a good group and everyone will work together and kill the monsters as a unit. That's great.

I'm here to write columns to help you out, and frankly, you don't need help with good groups. You need my help for the groups with the fury warrior in full Firelands gear who shows up in your heroic Deadmines run and does 28k DPS. (I said I was sorry.) You need my help for the ret paladin who doesn't know what his interrupt is called (Rebuke) or the mage who won't cast Polymorph because it's just going to break anyway when he starts jumping around casting Arcane Explosion constantly for no reason.

This week, we're going to talk about how to gear and play a tank starting out in normal level 85 instances and the first tier of Cataclysm heroics.