• World of Warcraft: New Holiday Coming Soon
• WoW: New Dungeon System
• WoW: Race Change feature Goes Live
• Fall World of Warcraft Clothing Line
• WoW: New Life Sized Replicas Introduced
• WoW: More Tier 10 Previews are Out
• WoW: Real Life WoW Halloween Masks for Sale

Welcome
to The
Overpull, Ten Ton Hammer's weekly newsletter that discusses all things
WoW. Want to get it in your inbox each week? Click here to subscribe.

China is still having WoW problems but no one in the NA/European servers care. A lot of players say "haha gotcha Chinese gold farmers", but think a moment. The Chinese gold farmers play on our servers, not their own.

Blizzard says you will die, a lot, going into Icecrown. That a good thing or bad thing? I don't know, per se, but let's hope the difficulty is at that sweet spot that everyone is happy and only the people who complain no matter what are the complainers.

• WoW: Paladin Guide
• Kirin Tor Reputation Guide
• World Of Warcraft: Nostalgia Content - Bringing the Past Back to Life

Blues Clues

• Ghostcrawler posts something that isn't a rant about people screaming nerfs "I don't think a world-wide LFG channel would be something you'd really want. It would immediately become the global chat channel for trade, spam and Chuck Norris jokes.

  On live it's restricted to people using the LFG tool. The new dungeon tool honestly makes matches so quickly under most conditions that that implementation won't work. We feared people would just use the /trade channel if we didn't make a similar /lfg channel."

Welcome to another edition of The Overpull. The Overpull is a little embarrassed this week. A few hours after it went live we saw race changes officially enter the game. Did The Overpull force Blizzard’s hand? Probably not, but you can now switch to any race your class can play on your side of the faction fence. Let's talk about it below.

Here’s the lineup this week

• What’s the Buzz
  Hybrid tax, race changing, private servers, and more.
• PTR Roundup
  What’s on the PTR this week? Upcoming raid tests, as usual.
• It Happened in /trade
• TTH WoW Forum Spotlight
• The Weekly Musing
  What kind of player are you?
• Loremaster's Corner
  So what's up with the Horde vs. Alliance storyline?
• This Week's Forum Post
  Come join us for discussion this week on the forums!

Blizzard’s legal team is going after another private server. They’ve got the same team who took on bnetd to help take out the nefarious crew who run this pirated version of the game. See, it’s one thing to emulate the server (which is against the law) and it’s another to make an income off of it. One is just a bad thing; the other is a really bad thing folks. For those of you who don’t know what a private server is then let me tell you. It’s a server where some programmer reverse engineered the game in order to emulate the game server. This lets you play without Blizzard’s permission and often riddled with egomaniacs, drama, and constant server wipes.

It just goes to show people that if you’re going to invest in a game, invest in the legit version. WoW is cheap enough and fun enough that you don’t need to pay some nefarious types online to get your fix. Besides, who knows, you might be subpoenaed when Blizzard gets a craving for revenge.

So, race changing went in last week...

Now, some are claiming this is a huge money grab by Blizzard. Because shortly after it went live there was a nerf to Will of the Forsaken (the Undead racial) that makes it not so great anymore. This means that those who changed to Undead or those who picked want to change over to a race with a superior racial. Some think Blizzard planned this out as a way to make money and I honestly think it is. This isn’t something that you have to do though. PvP aside, you only need a pvp trinket and WotF for one fight (heroic faction champs) so it’s not THAT bad. PvP I can see, but I guess everyone should be happy enough to have a trinket without having to equip one.

The hybrid tax [link]. Ghostcrawler, who some like to call Derek Smartcrawler (though I would not say that myself), stickied a thread about hybrids and the hybrid tax. Basically it says that pure classes should do better DPS than hybrids if everything was equal to justify a pure class not having the ability to respec into something else. The hybrid tax is a mystical figure with no firm percentage and applies to any class that has the option to respec into another role. In summary, people should stop asking for buffs for your class using the pure vs. hybrid argument as a justification. Sounds to me like it’s a bad attempt to hush up the WoW forum crew and the vocal majority who scream buff them nerf others constantly.

The Guild this week did a Halloween special. I didn’t pay a lot of attention. Speaking of videos, what’s with machinima being nothing but rapping Blood Elves? Bring back some Illegal Danish style videos please.

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy the PTR this last week’s been nuts. We’ve got the gunship testing which looks like a super awesome amazing pony filled fight with jetpacks and airship dueling. Now I admit, my Dreamcast broke before I beat Skies of Arcadia and the PS2 copy is gaining dust, but I do know airships are cool and dueling airships are better. The fight looks good but I’m kind of wary of the bugs that may come about from the advanced dynamics of it.

Valithria Dreamwalker… so instead of doing DPS you need to do enough HPS to get her to full. She starts at 50% and you have to heal her in order to win. Arthas, being the smart overlord he is, throws “stuff” at you until you do it. So you either wipe or get the nice green dragon to full. Sounds like a ton of fun and should be something different.

Sindragosa has a cleave and an encounter that looked like Sapphiron, almost. She cleaves, breaths ice (instead of fire), and will beat you down with her tail. She’ll pull everyone to her and you have to run or else she’ll insta kill the entire raid. When she takes off she does a little bit of Sapphiron magic by turning a few random raid members into ice block and then throws down ice bombs. These bombs require you in a position to block the damage from them. So you have to maneuver around the ice tombs until you’re sure you won’t get hit. Looks pretty good.

Quel'Delar is coming. It’s got a backstory. It seems that the vampire guild that Arthas is contracting out to run his operations while he works on the A/C in his castle is led by some Blood Elf who shattered it. It seems that you’ll need to get some shards and purify it in the Sunwell in order to wield this epic purp. Guess we’ll see where that goes.

Deathwhisper was up too, but I didn’t pay much attention to that. It seems like a lot of these encounters are already down. Awesome.

It seems like Arthas has turned up his A/C a bit and the Icewell Presence buff is now a 20% reduction to dodge. So this means that your tanks will be getting hit more often and we’ll hopefully see an easier time for healers. Maybe… maybe.

WotF is getting nerfed (that’s Will of the Forsaken for you non-Horde members). I consider it a cure for the undeath because race changing to the living races is going to hit hard and strong for a lot of upper tier Forsaken with the cash to spend. Read above if you want more on this hot topic.

[3. Trade] Join our guild, blah blah blah blah blah, our guild is AWESOME for following reasons.
[3. Trade] That guild is a NINJA

Why is everything in trade chat all about the word ninja? You can't mention a guild name without them being called a ninja, just because trade can.

Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

A thread about Chill of the Throne, the hot topic in WoW right now, come comment!

This week I ask you a very simple question. Would you rather sit in one place and kill a camp of fast respawning enemies over and over or would you rather kill very few enemies and walk quest to quest.

In the days of ‘ol you used to set up “camp” in one spot. You and a group of likeminded individuals would work out an enemy level that you could easily take and then fight those same enemies until the healer logged off or everyone (yeah right) out leveled the area. I used to do this a lot on my Necromancer in DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot), so much so that I ended up with 7 levels 50s and my friends have multiple level 50s of their own. I really enjoyed just sitting there talking and pulling mobs as a kind of a mini-game between the talking.

In Ragnarok Online the enemies moved so you had to move around to fight them, but there were no quests. There was just killing enemies to level up.

The problem with this is that it takes an hour for you to notice your quest bar to move a bit. You may never realize your XP is coming in since it comes in slow small amounts. It’s a frustrating experience, but you were playing for the social aspect more than the “I’m leveling super fast!”

Part of WoW’s popularity was that they changed it up a bit. You still grinded away, but you did so by questing. You’d go grind a bit, turn in a quest, and see an instant bump to your XP bar. Now, don’t let the game fool you, they’re not rewarding grinding with MORE xp. They’re saving up the XP you would have normally got from grinding and they shove it into a quest. You turn in the quest and you get that bit of XP all at once. Of course, it is easier since you can solo as any class, but the discussion is about moving around or standing still.

So which is better? I don’t know, personally. I love the feeling you get when you turn in a whole quest log and see you gain 4-5 bubbles. On the other hand, I loved grouping up and sitting in a group talking, resting up after a fight, and being social in the game. I don’t love being tied to that as the only way to group.

What do you like doing?

Let us know on the forums!

Last week we talked about Kel’thuzad and how he ruined all of the High Elves because Arthas wanted to bring him back to life. So this week why don’t we talk about the war between Orcs vs. Humans. Tension has indeed being advancing as each patch introduces some more in the overall story. We’ve got to blow up some cannons in Hellfire, some bgs where there is some kind of weird reason for you to fight, and the PvP dailies in Grizzly Hills. Oh and some cutscenes/cinematics with Garrosh and Varien being all tough stuff and hating one another.

This is a fun one. So basically the orcs had a sip of some of Mannoroth’s kool-aid in Outland and become servants for the Burning Legion. Sargeras, inside of Medivhs body, opened the Dark Portal to allow the orcs to come in and invade Azeroth. Because, you know, that’s just a good idea in general. They come in, ruin Stormwind, kill the king, and the humans flee to Lordaeron. The story is kind of “iffy” because the games don’t talk a lot about it and they merged the two storylines together since in Warcraft I and II the Humans and Orcs win.

So, they go to Lordaeron, gather the troops, and retake Stormwind. They then shove the orcs back through the portal, close it up, and call it a day. A lot of orcs remained and they were thrown into internment camps and treated rather poorly. The humans declare victory and all is well. That is until Warcraft III.

The orcs start the game off by leaving towards Kalimdor being led by Thrall. Grom Hellscream is onboard because he’s cool like that. They free the orcs and take off in some ships they steal. You forget about them for awhile and come back. They’re in Kalimdor after joining up with some trolls and then they join up with the taurens. They then set up a base, steal some lumber, and the night elves are like oh no you didn’t. So Cenarius shows up to stop the damage to nature and good ‘ol Mannoroth shows up. He spikes a fountain with his blood enslaving the remaining orcs AGAIN, causing the majority of them to turn to beef up and kill Cenarius (who goes off into the Emerald Dream). They then pretty much destroy an Alliance base (Jaina being smart fled) and then turn on Thrall.

Thrall and Cairne join up with Jaina and decide to capture Grom (who’s all high on the kool-aid) into a crystal. They purify his soul and lead an attack on Mannoroth. Grom kills Mannoroth and dies shortly thereafter. Afterwards everyone joins up to kill Archimonde. In the prologue to WoW you see Proudmore didn’t like the Orcs and didn’t care that they helped save everyone and aren’t demon spawn anymore. So he goes and tries to kill ‘em all.

Thrall joins up with Rexxar who kills him and saves his people. Then it becomes kind of an uneasy peace. Neither side really has much reason to do anything to one another, but they don’t have much reason not to either. The orcs were put into internment camps when the war was over and the orcs killed a ton of the alliance. Jaina and Thrall have been working on peace ever since.

In Cataclysm we’re supposed to see this old plotline reignite. Is that a good thing? I don’t know, but we’ll see I guess!

Forum link again for discussion should you want to come join our community and chat!

-David "Xerin" Piner