WotLK and illidan

Illidan?

What about Illidan you may ask, well, WE KILLED THE BASTARD !! Hah !! We got a video as well, which will be uploaded sometime later.

And, he was kind enough to drop a Warglaive on our first kill.


Trainer skills in WotLK

There's a pretty long post on the neograf forums which lists most of the new spell and ability ranks for hunters, druids, mages, paladins. And even other classes such as priests, rogues, shamans, warlocks and warriors. As you'll quickly see there are quite a few skills still missing.

Rogues

Sinister Strike: rank 11: 150 additional damage.

Sinister Strike: rank 12: 180 additional damage.

Backstab rank 11: 150% weapon damage plus 255.

Hemorrhage rank 5: 110% weapon, increases physical damage dealt on target by 75.

Mutilate rank 5: 153 additional damage.

Mutilate rank 6: 181 additional damage.

Eviscerate rank 11: 1 point 405 to 613 damage, 2 points 706 to 914 damage, 3 points 1007 to 1215 damage, 4 points 1308 to 1516 damage, 5 points 1609 to 1817 damage

Eviscerate rank 12: 1 point 497 to 751 damage, 2 points 867 to 1121 damage, 3 points 1237 to 1491 damage, 4 points 1607 to 1861 damage, 5 points 1977 to 2231 damage

Expose Armor rank 7: 560 armor per combo point.

Rupture rank 8: 1 point 324 damage over 8 secs, 2 points 460 damage over 10 secs, 3 points 618 damage over 12 secs, 4 points 798 damage over 14 secs, 5 points 1000 damage over 16 secs.

Deadly Throw rank 2: 1 point 223 to 245 damage, 2 points 365 to 387 damage, 3 points 507 to 529 damage, 4 points 649 to 671 damage, 5 points 791 to 813 damage.

Deadly Throw rank 3: 1 point 350 to 386 damage, 2 points 574 to 610 damage, 3 points 798 to 834 damage, 4 points 1022 to 1058 damage, 5 points 1246 to 1282 damage.

Garrote rank 9: 1092 damage over 18 sec.

Garrote rank 10: 1290 damage over 18 sec.

Ambush rank 8: 275% weapon damage plus 335.


Healing gear getting changed

Some interesting info from blizzard :

Tom Chilton (Kalgan) Wrote : We’re also going to be doing away with spell-damage only type gear. We’ll be moving to a system that, as part of your talents, will let players convert healing into spell-damage and vice-versa as part of their talents. That way they can use the exact same gear, but their talents just adapt what it does.”

More info on this at Deathknight.info.

Before you cry foul and scream that means mages will be rolling on your healing gear and priests on your warlock gear. Yeah they will. Also, spell damage based classes such as the above ones will have some of their talents and/or spells changed to reflect these changes. Meaning the holy priest tree for example will have a talent which converts x% of your spell damage into +Healing. So in the end you should remain pretty much at the same level as before.

There's also a shaman rumor that you'll be able to cast totems while silenced due to them being moved to the physical school.


Professions

Blizzard is planning some odd things for skinning, herbalism and mining.

Miner's Revenge (Rank 1) - Mining Pick - Hurls your pick axe at the target, inflicted 45 to 55 physical damage, ignoring any armor. 30 yard range, 5 minute cooldown.

Scalp (Rank 1) - Skinning Knife - Attempts to skin the target alive, causing them to bleed for 72 damage over 6 sec.

Could be quite useful for paladins (who have no real ranged attacks of their own, other than by talents) to pick up mining . Hopefully there are multiple levels of these skills, 50 damage is sort of poor even though it's free damage.


Inscription

Spell description for Inscription refers to it as "magical writings".

The following spells exist with no further decription : Silver Quill (Likely a tool needed like enchanter rods), Scroll of Stamina (Scrolls as expected), Scroll of Intellect, Scroll of Spirit, Earthen Ink (Another tool used?) , Silver Ink, Ivory Ink, Random Card: Rogues, Scroll of Recall.

Ability - Milling: Crush 5 herbs to create paste for inks. This will destroy the herbs in the process.

Demonic runes - Permanently enchant your fireball spells to inflict up to 50 additional fire damage.

Recipes:

Runeword of Minor Magic - Inscribe a runeword of minor magic onto a piece of chest armor to increase spell damage from magical spells and effects by up to 3 for 1 hour.


Also in the expansion

At least four new mounts : Frost Wyrm, Great Brewfest Kodo, Black Warp Stalker, Swift Zhevra

Frost wyrms will look much like the current nether drake, just frosty ;)

Brewfest kodos will be available to both factions.

The Zhevra is indeed a zebra type mount which you can see in the barrens.

Not sure what to think of the Warp stalkers, they seem rather small for a mount.

Also, several new images uploaded to Wikidot yesterday, and today.


Adverts

I signed up for Project Wonderful as a google alternative. Surprisingly you can also use both at the same time if you wished. Much like Entrecard is doing at the moment. PW uses a form of auctioning instead of pay per click or pay per subscription. Could be interesting to see how that works out. Won't know till you try at any rate.


Layout

I'm aware that the "li" html tag may look nice on the blog, it seems to cause odd jumps in some RSS readers. I'll have to look it up in the CSS some time.