• Let's All Play WoW PUG BINGO!
• WoW: Stat simplification
• No more Defence for Warcraft tanks
• WoW: Kurn's Corner Looks at Success in Random Instances

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• Getting the most out of the World of Warcraft Dungeon Finder
• Achieving Everything: Loremaster
• WoW - Guide to Ice Crown Citadel - The Plagueworks
• WoW Heirloom Items
• A Retrospective Look at World of Warcraft in 2009
• WoW: Rogue Equipment Guide

Blues Clues

• Oculus Loot Improvements
  To encourage players not to shy away from the many invigorating adventures to be had in The Oculus, we have applied a change to enhance the rewards players are provided when selected for this dungeon via the Random Heroic option in the Dungeon Finder. Once Ley-Guardian Eregos is defeated, one loot bag per character will be provided in his chest in addition to the current rewards. Each loot bag will offer players rare gems, two additional Emblems of Triumph, and a chance of being rewarded the Reins of the Blue Drake. ....

Welcome to another edition of The Overpull. This time it’s in 2010 instead of 2009! Hooray. We’ve got our usual fair of news, fun, and most importantly excitement for you this Tuesday morning. Without further ado here is The Overpull! 

Here’s the lineup this week

• What’s the Buzz
• TTH WoW Forum Spotlight
• The Weekly Musing
• Loremaster's Corner
• This Week's Forum Post
  Come join us for discussion this week on the forums!

Well, last week was the last of the holiday weeks. So we don’t have a lot to talk about. We do have two very fun subjects though, thankfully. Next week we should be able to return to shoveling down excellent WoW news instead of food (or liquor for New Years).

So rumblings are happening around Azeroth and they’re not just in adventurer’s stomachs. Random earthquakes are happening all over Azeroth as a prelude to the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. We’ve yet to run Arthas through with your blades and we’ve already got an angry emo dragon doing something under the ground. Various invisible NPCs (kind of like the NPCs that used to guard the forbidden areas of the game except these are invisible and nothing like those) are roaming around doing the Fel Reaver like shake up. I don’t know what to say about this, really, other than let’s all focus on Arthas before we get mixed up with Cataclysm.

The other thing is that Icecrown is opening up today. Are you prepared?

The simplification of Cataclysm gear also hit the news big time this week, but I honestly don’t feel that it’s new news. We’ll talk about it in the Weekly Musing if you want to scroll down there.

I’m sorry loyal Overpull readers that there hasn’t been a lot of news lately. The holiday season is now officially over so you can take respite in the fact that gears will be moving, guilds will be farming, and there will be things to talk about.

Wait, this just came in, they're nerfing Occulus. Well, buffing it with more loot. If you get it on random then you get two additional emblems of triumph, some rare gems (free money), and a chance at an epic blue dragon mount. That's going to be freaking awesome.

Halls of Reflection has had its gear requirement increased. Hooray?

Talk about this weeks news on our forums.

I'm currently tethered to my cellphone and unable to browse 99% of the web, but this thread looked awesome so I'm going with it:

The Battle of the Gear Score

I like this thread.

So last week we talked about dragons. So logically this week we should talk about dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs, but they’re not interesting to talk about since there isn’t anything to talk about them in WoW! So let’s talk dragons.

We learned last week about the different flights of dragons. Now it’s time to learn about the Blue Dragonflight. You may remember Malygos from when people cared to run him. Onyxia and high level welfare items took his place, but believe it or not he’s a major lore character. He’s also a lot more powerful than the game makes him out to be. So powerful that he causes a mini-cataclysm of his own but luckily adventurers stop it from going out of control.

Magic is a powerful force on Azeroth. So powerful that it can rip the very fabric of reality away if it’s abused too much. This is the reason for a lot of the “Mana ____” such as the Mana Wraiths and other weird creatures. It also attracts the Burning Legion, is addictive, and corrupts both the caster and the world. Using magic is a bad thing, especially if you don’t moderate yourself.

Well Malygos was a pretty cool dragon. When the First War happened there was this big fuss about how they would defend Azeroth from the invading demons. Deathwing proposed they put some of their power into the “Dragon Soul” and use that to defeat the demons. Malygos helped Deathwing talk everyone into it. So they did and he ganked the Dragon Soul, took control of a ton of dragons, and screwed everyone over. Malygos lost most of his flight and went mad with sorrow locking himself away.

In the Second War kidnap Deathwing kidnaps Alexstrasza and takes her to Grim Batol. Krasus tells Malygos about this, offers him a new brood, and snaps him out of his lull. He agrees and they all go kill Deathwing and destroy the Dragon Soul (or Demon Soul at that time). Malygos starts feeling a lot better and works on rebuilding his brood for awhile.

Well. He takes a good look at the world and sees that all of the problems with the world are due to the major abuse of magic. Not only that, but the use of magic is ripping the world apart. If something isn’t done to curb the use of magic then Azeroth is screwed big time. His solution isn’t forming a council and talking about. No, instead he decides to just wipe out any magic user that doesn’t have his express permission to use magic. The story is actually kind of fuzz, because the quests say one thing, Blizzcon says another, and then the books add in their take to everything. We’ll just say that Malygos says magic is bad and he wants to help “fix it”.

So he builds these giant surge needles to refocus all of the world’s magic to the Blue Dragonshrine in order to power up his dragons. These beefed up dragons then can be used to wipe out things such as the other dragons (I never figured that one out) and magic users. You do your part in this story by disabling the dragonshrine, killing the attackers on Wyrmrest, and killing Malygos.

The sad thing with this is that Malygos is a very powerful being. You don’t actually kill him. Instead the red dragonflight kills him. That doesn’t make it even better though. That just makes you feel better to know that one of the most powerful beings on Azeroth was killed by an equally powerful force instead of just a couple of adventurers. Just so you know, Alexstrasza could probably kill the Lich King without a problem. She could probably have leveled the Blue Dragonshrine and then take out most of Icecrown. She has 139 million HP and we know she has considerable power. After all she controls life itself.

The point of this story is that Malygos was ruined by Deathwing. He lost his entire brood save a few eggs and let magic go so long without its guardian. Then he comes back, turns against what he protects, and gets killed by some random adventurers. He did not even get to die in the battle against Deathwing.

WoW is really sad sometimes. Sometimes there isn’t a happy ending and we all get caught up in our lust for the purps that we never stop and think is this action a good one? Killing Malygos is a positive thing because he was going to ruin everything with his Surge Needles and his crusade against magic users. On the other hand I feel it was too soon to kill of one of the key players in the upcoming Cataclysm storyline.

Dragons are silly.

This week’s question is: Do you think that it’s a good idea to simplify gear?

I honestly feel that it’s not a good idea. I think that we should be able to min/max our gear. Not just “customize”  it with enchants since everyone is going to use the same enchants no matter what. I would rather spend time to figure out what’s the best gear for me and work hard on getting that out of an instance instead of there just being one best in slot item because it has the most stats.

Old WoW had a really good way of doing it. You had 1% critical strike on an item and that was it for critical strike. I say if you want to simplify then bring that back. Hide the specific numbers and replace them with percents. Have the percents adapt to the player’s level. So if an item gives say 1% critical strike right now then you would adjust it to say .5% if you went to level 85. Then make all of the level 85 gear align to 1% or 2% bonuses. Keep spellpower, MP5, attack power, haste, and both types of armor penetration. Put defense into talents and make dodge/block come with gear. There, the game is simplified.

Of course, that may still be too difficult for some players to follow and I’m rather biased. I loved Dark Age of Camelots ability to make your own gear and then gem it in a way that all of the stats were of your choosing. That was really awesome because it removed the need to raid in order to PvP and it was REALLY complicated.

Spellcrafting let you make gems which could be placed into crafted gear. Each gem had a point value and each item had a certain number of points that it could take. Therefore you had a lot to work with when customizing your gear. That wouldn’t work for WoW, obviously, but there is a lot of fun of finding gear and putting together your own best set instead of one specific piece being the best because it has the highest Agility or Intellect on it. 

Visit our forums and share your opinions.

That’s the weekly musing this week and concludes The Overpull. Stay tuned next week for more awesome news, funny stories, lore, and questions rolled together in your ultimate WoW newsletter.

-David "Xerin" Piner