Category: World of Warcraft

Today is Blizzard’s Blizzcon conference at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. They just announced that they were down to 7.6 million subscribers – but that’s only down from 100k and in a different perspective – they retained 98% of their subscriber base over the last quarter. If you’d like to stick your head into the /r/wow community’s IRC channel, point your browsers here or your IRC clients to irc.quakenet.org and joining the #blizzcon channel. Here’s a schedule detailing the events of the two-day gaming conference.

According to some upcoming patch notes for the next WoW patch, there are some fairly large but readily accepted changes.

Incoming 5.3 Gear Changes

• Base Resilience will be set to 65% for all characters level 85 and higher
• Resilience will be removed from nearly all PvP gear
• Players will still be able to use Resilience gems and enchants
• PvP power will remain exclusively on PvP gear
• PvP set bonuses that currently provide Resilience will now provide PvP Power
• Healers and hybrid-casters will benefit to a greater degree from PvP Power, and Battle Fatigue will increase to make PvP gear superior for healers.
• Conquest gear will be increased to item level 496 (up from 493).
• Elite gear will be decreased to item level 496. This gear will essentially become a prestige upgrade.
• The Big Change: We will be adding an item level ceiling to all gear in unrated Battlegrounds, Rated Battlegrounds and Arenas. All gear with item levels higher than 496 will be scaled down to 496 (Conquest gear item level). This includes even Conquest items that exceed the ilevel ceiling, such as weapons.

I for one welcome this – I think it will allow me to talk my pvp-isn’t-fun friends into some PVP if they will have the same resilience as every other character. Obviously they won’t do quite the same damage as people with the good PVP gear, but I think it should level the playing field a bit and make PVP in WoW a bit more about the skill involved and not the gear.

From now until February 25th World of Warcraft will be 50% off. The Battlechest is now $5, Cataclysm expansion is now $10, and the latest Mists of Pandaria expansion is only $20. Grab yourself a copy or grab a copy for your friend for that recruit-a-friend bonus!