I love what I’m hearing about the new itemization from beta. A lot of it is still in flux, but there’s a core variable that isn’t: a number of formerly separate stats have been combined:

• critical strike = critical strike + spell critical strike
• hit rating = hit + spell hit
• haste rating = haste + spell haste
• spellpower = healing + spell damage

This is absolutely wonderful. If you’re wondering why they’re doing this or why it’s so important to the quality of PvE, let’s geek out a bit and look at each class, the kinds of gear it currently wants, and what just the spellpower (healing + spell damage) combine means in terms of how it’s going to make your PvE instances and raids happier.

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As Blizzard announced last week, every WotLK raid will have a small-raid (10-man) option.

So if there are (guessing) four endgame raids at launch, each will have a 10 and 25 man version, creating a completely parallel path to the current 25-man raiding standard. Every subsequent patched-in raid will follow the same design. No more of this “two raids for small group raiding, eight raids for big group raiding”. All 10-man raids will be able to physically visit every raid instance, see every boss, gear up and progress along a similar path, and ultimately see the entire expansion.

This is like ice cream in digital form. Strike that, this is like a pack of ice cream wolves wearing ice cream shoulder-cannons running through the streets, shooting ice cream fireworks everywhere. This is simply the best news since the game was released.

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I’m working on a couple of pieces based on the WotLK news updates. Before that flurry of announcements, I was working on boring posts like “Master Looter is the only option”, “Pace isn’t that hard” and other pieces that sound even worse. Blah blah. I got bored while writing them.

I write everything concurrently, so when I do update it will be with a series of posts. This is how I wrote fiction, too.

Part of writing about the expansion is typing out the name of said expansion. I mistype WotLK every time. What should be:

Wrath of the Lich King

comes out:

Wrath of the Licking

(Insert massively multiplayer punchline here.)