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Diablo III Information Recap

posted Mon at 16:57

Diablo III Information Recap
With a little over one day to go, now is the best time to catch up on all the information out there about Diablo III that you might have missed! Our friends over at Diablofans have been hard at work putting this massive recap together. Even if you know all about the game, there can easily be Blizzcon videos, trailers, pictures or many other things you may not have seen or have forgotten about!

Keep in mind this could be a bit of a spoiler to some. For example the final boss of the game was announced last year in an official interview. Information like that is placed without spoiler warnings. Monster Affixes is also listed in the Monster section. Other than that, any spoilers require you to click on a picture to see.

Diablo III - The Classes
Diablo III has only one returning class type - the Barbarian. The other four are new to Diablo III. Click the pictures below to get loads of information on each, such as facts, lore, rune skills, and other videos!

Diablo III - The Followers
The Followers are companions to the player which help him in combat with different skills and buffs. In their article you can find details about their stats, equipment, dialogue and videos for each.

Diablo III - The World
Same as the previous game, Diablo III will have 4 acts. The worlds are randomized just as Diablo II was with the exception of towns and major quest locations. Clicking on the areas will give you information on acts, locations, and level generation. Monsters will give you what we currently know about monsters, affixes and bosses. Quests will explain Blizzard's intentions with the questing system and give a summery of all known quests so far.

Diablo III - Items and the Auction House
Diablo III introduces a feature which hasn't been explored much in the gaming world - a Real Money Auction house, where you can buy and sell items from the game for real currency. Apart from that is a standard Gold Auction House. They have also included a huge summary of information about the Items in the game.

Diablo III - Game systems and Modes
Diablo III has many core changes from Diablo II. Skill and Runes particularly have had many changes made quite recently, which might have confused a lot of people. This can be fixed in the Skill and Runes article. Crafting is almost entirely new to the franchise. Magic Find includes lots of information about the popular stat and the new buff called Nephalem Valor. There is also major info on Multiplayer, PvP, Difficulties and the Hardcore mode.

Diablo III - Story and Achievements
There is also a small summary of the Diablo's storyline so far, plus lots of videos of all cinematics and information about books involved with the game. Also an important note, unlike the other articles the achievements is not so much a recap, as it is a FULL LIST, so SPOILER WARNING

Ghostcrawler on account-wide achievements

Richardboone

posted May 8, 12

by Adam Holisky May 8th 2012 at 12:00PM

Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has just released a new post on account-wide achievements. He makes a strong point that Blizzard's overall design goal is that it doesn't want us playing one character over another only because of achievement concerns. This is quite good news for raiders with multiple alts and others who need to use achievements as a sort of progress check on their moving-out-of-the-fire skill and game knowledge.

Some key notes from Ghostcrawler's blog post:

While you only earn achievement points once, you will still see the achievement pop-up notification if you earn it again on a second character.
Most achievement criteria are not account-wide. That is, if you explore Thousand Needles, you'll need to explore it all on one character to get the associated exploration achievement.
Meta achievements like What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been are account-wide, meaning you can finish Flame Warden on one character and Noble Gardener on another.
Faction-specific pets, mounts, and titles will not work across faction -- that is, no Alliance mounts for Horde characters.
The goal is to share rewards across the entire account that are granted from achievements.

In particular regard to that last point, Ghostcrawler says: "I'm not going to promise this yet, because a lot of magic has to happen for that to work, but it's our intent." So that looks to be very much work in progress still, but it's great to know where Blizzard is headed.

Ghostcrawler's full post after the break.

Ghostcrawler -- Bringing Achievements to the Account Level

We recently added account-level changes to achievements in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, and there's still a lot of work left before we're done. The plan here is to illustrate the intent behind our design, which should in turn help you figure out the answers to many of your questions.

Overall, we never want you to play Character A instead of Character B because of achievement concerns. If Character A had the Violet Proto-Drake, then you might not play Character B. If Character A was only one holiday away from the Violet Proto-Drake, then you may not play Character B. If Character A had completed most of the raid achievements from Dragon Soul, you may not want to bring Character B for one fight and miss out on the achievement. Having alts is cool and working on achievements is cool, but we don't want the two systems to work against each other.

This goal is paramount and drives everything else. If we allowed you to earn extra achievement points from completing an achievement on two different characters, then you might only want to play the character with the most points and you'd feel like you had to grind through all the achievements with every alt, thus defeating the purpose of having account-level achievements.

Most achievements are account-wide

This means you only earn the points once. If you have earned an achievement on one character, you can see it on all your characters. However, and this is important, you will still see the achievement toast (the pop-up notification) if a second or subsequent character completes the achievement. We think it's still important to recognize milestones like reaching level 80, maxing out a profession, or killing a raid boss for the first time. It's fun to have everyone congratulate you when you get the toast. Nonetheless, this will just be a new character of yours completing the achievement that you've already earned on your account. You won't double up on points.

Most criteria are not account-wide

If you start an achievement on one character, you can't then finish the achievement on another (there are exceptions, so please keep reading). We didn't think it made sense for one character to get level 60 and another to get level 20 and then see the "level 80" achievement toast. If you start to explore Thousand Needles on one character, you'll probably want to finish that achievement on the same character.

Some achievements are "meta achievements."

These are achievements that require you to get other specific achievements. An infamous example is "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been." These achievements generally ARE account-wide. If one character earned Noble Gardener and another character earned The Flame Warden, then your account would get Long Strange Trip. (Otherwise it would be weird: it would look as if you had the sub-achievements, but you wouldn't have the meta-achievement). Even though you need Explore Thousand Needles on one character, all of your characters can contribute to Explore Kalimdor.

A very few achievements are account-only.

There are two categories of account-only achievements. One is achievements that are not possible to earn on one character. If we made an achievement to level every class to level 90, it would be account-only. (I'm not sure we will, but it's a good example.) The other category are achievements that are just brutal to complete on one character (and you'd never want to do for multiples), such as 2500 daily quests or 250K honorable kills. In these cases, the cumulative work of all your characters on those criteria will count.

We hope that rewards granted from achievements (pets, mounts, titles, and tabards) will be shared at the account level.

I'm not going to promise this yet, because a lot of magic has to happen for that to work, but it's our intent. We have discussed having a character level requirement for some rewards, so that your level-2 gnome couldn't walk around with the "Defender of a Shattered World" title just because your level-90 shaman earned it. If the gnome made it to level 80, though, you could proudly show off your title. You also won't be able to use a faction-specific pet, mount, or title on the wrong faction. The achievement wouldn't go away -- you just wouldn't be able to show it off on that character. There are probably additional exceptions and details we'll find as we dig deeper into the system.

This is the kind of system that will evolve over time, and we don't think this has to be the way achievements work forever. As beta players start experimenting with it and offering feedback, I am certain that we will end up making even more changes.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft. He loves you very, very much. Yes, you.

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How to get rid of the Carbonite Out-of-Date Message

Richardboone

posted Apr 3, 12

This message was hardcoded in the Mod. To stop it, do the following:

Go to your "Path to your WoW folder\Interface\AddOns\Carbonite\" folder, and look for the "Carbonite.lua" file.

Back the file up, and change the copy so that you will have the original to put back in place if you experience any problems.

Open that file and search for 120327, not the numbers in the other thread. Those numbers equate to YearMonthDay. The day the message started was 2012, March 27, or 120327. Change it to 130327, save the changes, and you should be good to go.

In my "Carbonite.lua" file, they are on line 18168, but I've seen different lines for the same things in Lua files from the same addon before, so...... Hopefully, that is not the case here.

I followed the instructions and it worked for me. I used Wordpad. DO NOT use Word to do this.

RB

Mists of Pandaria: Pet Battle system details revealed

Richardboone

posted Mar 28, 12

by Matthew Rossi on Mar 27th 2012 (4 hours ago)

Wowhead News has done what many voices crying out in the wilderness demanded and gone through the Mists of Pandaria database, collecting details for the upcoming Pet Battle system. If you're eagerly, perhaps even impatiently waiting for information about what's coming, you can sate some of that curiosity with this guide covering new pets, pet abilities, and locations for collecting new pets in the wild. The folks at Warcraft Pets helped, too.

There's a lot of detail to be had, including details on how the Pet Battle abilities are broken up (it's not quite grass type vs. fire type) and how to command your pets to be the very best. So head on over and check it out.

It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

Dragon Soul: Power of the Aspects buff to 15% on March 27th

Richardboone

posted Mar 21, 12

by Adam Holisky on Mar 21st 2012 (2 hours ago)

The Power of the Aspects buff will increase to 15% during the maintenance next week (Tuesday for the North American realms, Wednesday for those across the pond). This should be nothing new to most folks, as the buff has been ongoing for the past couple months.

As always, you can turn the buff off by talking to Lord Afrasastrasz at the beginning of the instance.

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