One key guideline iff (if and only if) it is followed I think could make everything work out.  Any new ability added needs to be usable in what ever form the druid is in.  With the caveat that it may have different effects based upon form and or specialization.  The current 3 per tier could work if the previous guideline is always followed but I given the history of the class developers it will not be until 5.1 at the earliest before all the druid class specializations are playable in end game content or at least be on par with the other classes regardless of role.  So because of this putting 4 talents per tier would work better because it give the developers more fiddly points to play with to tune and keep any one talent from becoming too over powered.

So why is it that I think 4 talents are needed.  Well there are 2 sides of the game, PvE and PvP.  If the “Trinity” of PvE content was a Trinity then everything would be fine, however it is not really a trinity when you look at it realistically.  There are at least 4 roles, Tank, Heals, Ranged DPS and Melee DPS.  In general given how most classes play Ranged DPS and Heals are similar and Tank and Melee DPS have similar issues.  So 4 types of play and 2 environments of play gives us a total of 8 combinations when you select one from each.  Due to having 8 types of play and only 3 choices per tier there will be no variety.  Once the numbers are crunched there will almost always be 1 talent of each tier that you will want to take given the 8 types of play.  There will also be a lot of overlap.  However with 4 choices and 2 choices at each tier designed with 4 of the types of play taken into consideration you increase the likelihood of actually given the players of Druids a choice of what to pick at each tier.

In most cases you would pair up Tank/Melee and Range/Heals when choosing talent design because they ham similar issues to deal with in each environment.  Now given the type of talent i.e. healing, survivability, damage increase, crowd control or some other ability you may change-up the pairings.  Maybe 2 PvE and 2 PvP talents that are usable in all forms so you don’t favor 1 particular spec.

Anyway I think it has been mentioned before but I wanted to reiterate the concept of changing the Druid talent tree in MoP while there is still time, one would hope.

Blizzard needs to make a very very public announcement about this behavior and fast.  There are only 2 options.

1 – They are not exploiting the system and are just being creative

The result will lead to Hundreds of guilds then doing this, and hopefully Blizzard will come up with something else in MoP.  I actually hope this is the path they take.  Just let those play how they want to play.

2 – They are exploiting the system and will be punished

This is the result that will most likely happen or at least that it will be deemed an exploit.  Additionally something a lot more punishing than just removal of all newly acquired gear will need to be done.  I would hope a 2-4 week ban.  If they want to make sure it will not be done again then a perma-ban.

In a MMO exploiting needs to be punished and severely enough that the majority of the playerbase will not even consider thinking outside the box for an advantage.  That is what is really the root of this problem, the 1 loot attempt per boss per week in the LFR.  If the LFR were to be treated like the normal dungeon finder and have not loot restrictions then no one would have a problem with this behavior.  It is only a problem because Blizzard has made it one.

Over the past few weeks I had 2 large posts plans, unfortunately when I did end up having time to work on the posts I was just not in the mood.  Either mentally tired from work or sucked into The Game of Thrones book series.  That series in itself could elect a few thousand word rant, I like it and hate it at the same time.

My overall opinion before getting into the details is very positive.  I see even more potential in what they are doing in MoP than with Cataclysm.  Hopefully unlike Cataclysm they will not screw it up.  Until MoP comes out and we all can compare it to all of the other expansions and vanilla, I really think Wrath was the best expansion in terms of having something for damn near everyone.

New Race: Pandaran

I am pretty indifferent to the addition of this race as a playable option to the game.  Ya they look cool and I find them interesting.  I think my indifference to their inclusion and that they are going to be able to be both Horde and or Alliance, while a fantastic mechanic addition to the game, is really ya that is what we have all been expecting for years.  Of all the races the Pandaran was the one that fit the mold the best to be neutral to both warring factions.  I am now waiting for the Consortium race from tBC to be included like the Pandaran as a neutral starting race and then picks a side.  I also expect in some future expansion for Naga and Firbolgs to be included, Naga for horde and Firbolgs for Alliance.  Maybe also add Ogres and Broken in when we go back to the Twisted Nether to fight the Legion again through the additional portals  in Outlands.

New Class: Monk 

I was happy to see the addition of this class to the mix for several reasons.  First and foremost it is a leather wearing trinity class, as in it wears leather and can perform all 3 major roles.  That it is melee dps and not caster makes sense but is unfortunate due to WoWs encounter designers.  I will be griping about that at a later point.  I am looking forward to this class helping to balance out the loot distribution averages.  I worry about the burst damage of their abilities that is going to be required to keep their dps competitive since they have no auto-attack.  Again makes sense thematically but the devil is in the details when it comes to balancing damage.

New PVP : MURDER BALL!!!!

The arena can burn in hell for all I care when it comes to PvP, it has been nothing but a pain in the ass to PvE and class balance since it was implemented.  So many complications have been added to the PvE side of the game due to this one feature that it really should have been removed from live servers ages ago and become it’s own sub game where it could be balanced independently of the PvE game, ya know that part of the game that actually brought millions of players to the game.  Hell even world PvP, PvP servers and BGs are better for the game than arenas.

Now I have played a little bit of Murder Ball in Rifts when my subscription was still active and I have to say that the one battleground equivalent map that was a Murder Ball setup was really fun.  I really like this type of dynamic play much better than Capture the Flag, King-of-the-Hill and node control that is all of our other BGs are currently designed around.  There are some other forms of PvP/PvE play styles that would be interesting in my opinion but I will save them for a future post.

New PVE : Finally actual Mini-Games and (Skirmishes/Scenarios)

Between Diablo 3 for free with a one year commitment on one account and these 2 new features are what is keeping me active in WoW at the moment.

I have said for a long time that WoW needs some dedicated mini games to help fill the time when not raiding / pvp-ing / waiting on the finder Queue.  The fact that it is a Pokemon-esque mini-game looks fun to me.  I have always been interested in the Pokemon hand held games not so much the CCG, however I refuse to buy a new hand held device each time a new game comes out, or buy 3 different version of the same game to have access to all the choices at the current generation level.  Now that something like it is being added to WoW is great IMO.

Having played many different MMOs now and still playing a few of them the Scenarios or WoW Skirmishes similar to LotROs is a very much needed addition to the PvE side of the game.  Given the arms race that exsists between the encounter designers and the player-base that has been going on since MC days these have been desperately needed all through Cataclysm and even in Wrath.  Something that will not really need a Tank and maybe even a Healer is a nice addition to small group content.  Breaking the PvE Trinity by just requiring DPS and not standing in the fire or some other similar mechanics will allow greater throughput in a shorter period of time.

Actually this makes me thing of a relationship between length of content and the number of times it can be done before the player-base gets bored with it in either direction.  Either they run it so many times they can not bare to look at it again or it takes so long to go through it, that it is not worth the commitment.  The relationship reminds me of wavelength and frequency, meaning that there some sort of harmonic frequency or beat frequency that may be ideal to describe the relationship between the different types of content.  Rate of reward would also need to be factored for each type of content.  Hmm that will need more though to flesh out at a later time.

New PVE: Leveling Content and Normal Mode Dungeons

More stuff to do, more gear to get same old same old, pretty neutral to this segment of the details, other than there will be no lvl 90 normal mode dungeons like we saw with the 3 85lvl dungeons is nice to hear.  That they are indicating that Scenarios will fill the gap here is good to hear however I hope to hell that lvl 90 is not the only bracket that scenarios will become available.  Scenarios/Skirmishes start at lvl 20 in LotRO which is acceptable, a similar point or maybe lvl 30 would be equivalent in WoW.  The more options to level the better IMO, I am ultimately getting sick of questing.  Yes I have 11 85s, that is why I am getting sick of questing and unfortunately all of the xp nerfs in PvP/BGs at lower levels makes it annoying to level via PvP as well.

New PVE: Raids : More of the Same

The presentation from the Dungeons and Raids panel, Q&A was some of the most disappointing display of information about the next expansion.  The analysis from them was also some of the most infuriating WTF moments of the weekend.

Ok first what pissed me off the most and at this time has me not caring about Raiding what so ever in MoP is the following summary.  Essentially they admit that Ulduar and bosses like 3D Sarth were really popular but they did not like how you activated the multi-difficulty bosses in Ulduar.  Ok I can accept that the activation process was a little arcane, but to then use that as an excuse as to why they can’t build multiple difficulty level bosses in the future is complete BULLSHIT!!  You make the game you have control over how everything works in the end, don’t say that because you don’t like the interface you can’t do something.  Here is an idea, CHANGE THE BLOODY INTERFACE to something you are happy with.  They player base at the moment at least some of it can and will deal with the normal/heroic and the LFR/Normal/Heroic place that is in place now, ONLY BECAUSE THAT IS ALL YOU ARE GIVING US TO USE.

Now I have respect and understanding for every development team at Blizzard, with the exception of the WoW boss Encounter team and maybe the Devs that like to fill an instance with a metric fuck ton of trash between boss encounters.

New PVE: Raids : My Hope of Change

Now having bitched about a few things about the upcoming raids I hope that something more than just the LFR/Normal/Heroic paradigm in the next expansion.  Keep the LFR at the easiest level with no toggle would be find, but get rid of Normal/Heroic and just have (LFR – Static Very Easy Setting, Premade – Variable Level of Difficult per Encounter).

Also if the main concept is War for MoP, please for the love of what ever Diety you believe in can we have Varian Wrynn and Garrosh  Hellscream as Raid bosses in a raid like we had with ToC, 1 instance 2 different raids based on faction.  I want these 2 characters to be dead for future expansions.  Most Alliance don’t care about Varian and most players of both factions hate Garrosh.

In Conclusion

I still in the end the result of MoP will be positive, and at the moment am waiting on it as Cataclysm has been a Cataclysmic failure IMO and just want the pain to end.

Anyway, in Wrath I really liked Discipline healing, shielding really, but the spec was interesting.  However after the healing mana nerf from hell that was Cataclysm, it is a pain in the ass to play Discipline and still have mana to do anything with.  Yes I know there is a way for Disc to get mana back and it is through Evangelism.  That mechanic while great for PVP blows in PVE.  To get your stacks up and running well you need to Holy Fire and or Smite.  Now at least Smite with the correct talents will also heal and essentially replaces your Heal Spell, except when you want to heal.  Currently the only way to replace 1 button with these 2 spells is to do it with a macro and use a modifier key to switch between them.  In the middle of dodging fire or the rogue on your ass this is not possible.  If they want us thinking then game play needs to slow down even more to the point where you are not relying on muscle memory to do a job.  That is not skill or decision making process that is just automatic reflexes programmed through repetition, no thought needed.

So one of 2 things really needs to be modified to keep clutter under control.  We need more expansive logic structures possible in the macro interpreter or an extra spell added to Evangelism.  I really think Evangelism needs to have Heal also added into the list with Smite and Holy Fire. This will allow those that don’t like to deal damage to heal an alternative so they can actually use the mana regenerative mechanics for the spec.  This whole post was really to set up that one sentience in bold, I don’t think much else needs to be said.

Well now that I say that and I think about the dark side for a moment, there is one change as well.  I think Dark Evangelism needs to have Mind Spike added into the list with Mind Flay. This will allow for a DE to build up when you are on a short burn phase with adds or trash and have Mind Flay for the normal rotation.  Given the cool down on Archangel it will not really effect Shadow all that much.

When asked about what some of the best designed, maybe not tuned but for over all design many times players will say Ulduar and also include Obsidian Sanctum for OS0-3d.  I would also add in Faction Champions from Trial of the Crusader into this mix for a separate reason than the previous 2 encounters.

OS Zero through 3 Drake  and Ulduar

This series of encounters were designed very well because they allowed players/groups/guilds to progress at their own pace in difficulty.  The inane binary hard modes did not occur until ToC the tier after Ulduar.  IMO this moving away from multiple levels of difficulty on with the same boss as in Sarth, Freya, Flame Leviathan and Yogg.  Was abandoned to increase the rate of new content since most likely at about this same time was when the realization of how much work was needed to redo Azeroth for Cataclysm.

So with T9, T10, and T11 we get 2 difficulty modes with bosses of either Easy and Very Hard with no progressive intermediate difficulty modes.  This type of content sucks.

Add to it the inane cock block of end boss encounters being tied to being able to unlock earlier boss hard mode encounters which was supposed to be changed in Cataclysm, but was not.   Because of this we have a very different progression arc where there could very well be hard modes that are easier than the end boss encounter so there is not a smooth progression of encounter difficulty available.

To demonstrate numerically if 1 through 9 is used to describe difficulty of an encounter where 1 is easy and 9 is hard what you have today with the End boss Heroic Lock systems is a progression like the following | shows the lock out break.

Now: 1 2 4 5 7 8 | 5 7 8 8 9 9

A better progression if the unlocking was based on # of times a boss had been killed, like it was supposed to be, if Blizzard would record or display the information.

Better: 1 2 4 5 5 7 7 8 8 8 9 9

Yes this would require switching back and forth between heroic and normal modes but really who cares, it just needs to be possible.

Faction Champions

I pull out this encounter as being one of the better designed fights during Wrath of the Lich King for one very important reason.  Compared to about every other encounter in-game it is completely different.  The only similar encounter I can think of is the pvp like fight in Magister’s Terrace.   There may also have been one in vanilla wow that takes place in a pit but I am not familiar with a lot of the upper and lower black rock encounters so I am not sure.

Because the threat mechanics were different for this fight it made it play completely differently.  This is another example of how to change and vary fights.  Not to mention it is also a way to scale difficulty as well.  If in a different mode of the fight certain spells or actions cause a different response from the boss could make for an interesting way to change the fight.

Side Rant

For the bloody love of what ever deity you worship can we please get some sort of actual X,Y,Z range finder between other characters if we are going to have more fights like phase 3 Malygos and Al’Akir.  In both of these fights it would have been very helpful to have floating fragments of the platforms to use as reference points for Z-Axis alignment, similar to the end of The Occulus, except have the 3 platforms at different +Z values in relation to the main platform or boss.

Given the wow interface these 2 phases are complete assign.  Ya the elite hyper-focused raiding guild might not have a problem but lets look at the actual numbers from wowprogress, 4/3/2011

The numbers represented this way really don’t do the orders of magnitude justice.

So ya, I believe the red part of the Halfus bar could be larger if Cho’gal was not the gate for access to the hard mode on Halfus.  I also believe that Al’Akir may have more kills if we did not have to relearn how to play/move at the beginning of phase 3, as if the first 2 phases are not annoying enough.

I was originally suggesting it to be a feature to help cut down on gold buying.  The following 2 links had some initial discussion about ways to cut down on Gold Buying by eliminating some of the reasons that players buy gold.  In the end the only real way would be to remove gold from the game or make it bound to account and only usable with vendors, which would essentially remove the AH from the game.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/03/18/the-lawbringer-fighting-the-gold-fight-how-the-strategy-must/
http://wowalone.blogspot.com/2011/03/blizzard-should-buy-gold.html

In the mean time Blizzard has added a new item to the 4.1 patch notes that makes this alt-o-holic a happy camper.  If the logical extension of all of these changes is actually implemented a very very happy camper but that has yet to be seen or confirmed.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2231-Patch-4.1-Public-Test-Realm-Notes-March-30

• Many “Account Bound” heirlooms are now labeled as “Battle.net Account Bound”, meaning that they can also be traded or mailed to characters that are on different World of Warcraft accounts under the same Battle.net account.
• Mail sent to characters on the same Battle.net account now arrives instantaneously, as it does for the same World of Warcraft account.
• Mailing account-bound items to characters of the opposite faction on the same Battle.net account will now correctly translate faction-specific items to their appropriate equivalent.

If the mail is still not able to be sent cross server than a good workaround would be a Battle.net account bank, like the Vault you can pay to have available in LotRO.  It is one of the really nice features for trading materials between characters since the mail system is a little lacking without some of the mail add ons I use in wow.

Actually they really need to change the AH interface and decouple it with the mail system.  It would most likely greatly reduce the overhead on the mailing subsystem.  Make a second virtual hold system like the AH that is off market where all of your stuff sits for when you need to pick it up.  Also all items you want to auction are dumped there first.  By some of the comments in the UI dev Q&A it sounds like there is an overhaul to the AH coming so I will save more comments on what I think is wrong with the current implementation, other than the already existing posts here.

I still think a way hell even if it is an additional service fee like the mobile AH a way to move BoA and base gold/materials between servers would be a great boon.  It would give some players an entire new game to play.  It would be the world of market craft but letting the players equalize out the value of goods across both high and low population servers would be really cool.

More because unlike most of the time when I complain about something I usually have an idea/suggestion to post concerning the issue.  This one I don’t have really have any such thoughts on the subject.   I think the reason for my current dilemma comes from several conflicted points of view on the subject in general and what could be done about botting.

The reason why I am conflicted on this issue is simple, in all honestly there is a base level of botting needed to keep the in game market somewhat stable.  The extent of botting that currently seems to be going on is well past this stabilization point and is now becoming problematic.

This is further compounded by the transition between the “black market” bot users and the “white market” normal AH activity, because there are usually 1 or more layers of players between them moving materials and gold around by trying to make a profit.  This is because of how much trading actually can come out of trade chat.

If someone is trying to liquidate 10-100 stacks of some material most players could justify it as a fluke or good deal once, maybe even twice depending upon the time between transactions.   However if you work out a supply arrangement with someone and they start to supply you with 100+ stacks a week on top of tons of volatiles you then start to wonder how they are farming so much.  Here is where the dilemma begins, depending upon spawn rate, concentration of nodes and competition over said nodes it could be evaluated if the amount is reasonable given an almost exclusive farmer.  The issue is we don’t know what is actually reasonable and what is not, we can guess but there has been no real definitive quantification on what the average player could be expected to farm in a unit of time.

So what you then have is a “grey market” of players who are out for profits as gold is the only true thing worth anything in WoW since everything else deflates to worthlessness over time.

Given that blizzard could have near perfect information on the various transactions that occur between players through many means if enough extensive data mining was done most botters should become relatively easy to identify.  The dumb ones will just list their wares directly on the AH flooding the market and destructively devaluing everything for everyone.   The intelligent ones, the ones I don’t have a problem with, bark their materials on trade chat and let several layers of player manipulation pad the effect on the market.  This is preferred because you will have players with deep pockets or vast gold reserves hedging the market by stockpiling resources between patches based upon current price and demand.

Like I said I don’t really have any idea on what really should be done overall for this issue I have ideas on how to treat some of the effects but they fit better with a different post.

Order of the Perks

When looking at the guild perks the order of them in some cases are a bit haphazard and or silly as for usefulness to the guild on a whole.

Current order of Perks.

From a guild management perspective, I really think Cash Flow should have been the first guild perk.  Then while everyone was in the mass waves of leveling the guild bank could have profited a bit more from all of those leveling mobs being looted.  Really by the time guilds were level 3 or 4 with how bloody low the guild xp cap was per day, under the guise of the “No Guild Left Behind Act”, most of the perks were useless for mains while leveling.  Now perks are really just useful for the leveling of alts.

Additionally requiring honored to buy any of the heirlooms is complete and utter bullshit.  Guild reputation needs to be a Battle.net account based reputation and not on a per character basis.  Hell all reputation items should be account bound, doing the grind on one character is usually boring and a pain in the ass enough.  Given how piss poor the itemization on vendors is and the grind that some reputations are through dungeons with a tabard, most of the time you have found equivalent or better running the dungeons by the time you qualify for the bloody items.  The only exceptions to this are the epics at the end.

XP Cap and Moving Forward

I hope that after April 21st, so lets say May st, that the Guild XP cap per day is lifted.  After that point guilds that maxed out their XP per day can have already earned rank 25, place a meta achievement for guilds having reached 25 by this time and then remove the XP Cap per day.

The XP cap per day may be “nice” to those smaller or less active guilds but it is a slap in the face to all newly formed active guilds since the launch of the expansion.  Now they have to make sure to maintain a specific level of activity for a 5 month period just to get to the max cap.  I hate how Blizzard creates good systems and then screws them up with retarded limits.  Justice/Valor, Guild XP, Guild Rep, Heroic Daily Lock Outs.  Let people play what they want, when they want, however they want and get the hell out of the way.

No Guild Rename Service

Before this new Guild system and currently if/when you want a new guild name you would need to disband a guild and form a new one.  If you had all 6 guild bank tabs that could get expensive but in the end, it was only gold.  Now you have hours and days of effort invested in a guild to have its rank increased and there is no way to change a guild name without loosing all of that time  invested by many players.

There needs to be a system implemented to rename a guild without it requiring deletion.  Come on this is a base DB operation, I just hope to hell that the reason this has not been done before was because to enforce name uniqueness the named was used as a primary key.

No Guild Transfer Service

Going along the same lines as the guild rename services there are many legitimate reasons, especially with the free realm transfers that come up from time to time that a guild as a whole will want to change servers.  The same issues with renaming now come up with a much much steeper price now with the guild leveling system.  Now because of this guilds will only move when they absolutely must which will decrease the effectiveness of Blizzards realm population balancing initiatives.

Guild Banking and the “Bonus” currency loot, i.e. the tax system with no tax.

After a few weeks of having the “cash flow” perk and watching the amount of currency it brings in, it is a joke.  It is meaningless in a setting where 1 night of raiding requires 1000+ gold in materials raid wide not to mention repairs.  Part of the justification for these types of perks in the guild system were to help fund guild activities at the rate that currency actually flows in we are looking at about half a few months worth of looting to equal the cost of 1 night of raiding or whatever equivalent level of content you want to work with, raiding is definitely the most expensive.

I think the way to make this perk more useful is expand it in 2 dimensions.

1. A flat increase in the percentage.  Say 5% goes to 10% and the second goes from 10% to 20% this will increase the rate by 100% but it is still pathetically weak even at that.
2. The second and best way to improve this would be to also generate the same percentage extra for the guild bank when turning in a quest, especially daily quests, but I think all quests would be reasonable.

The net effect of both of these improvements would be to take the silly small amount generated from looting from maybe 1 gold a day to 2 gold a day.  Additionally if you figure that the average raider will do about 150-200 gold a raid day worth of dailies to fund themselves as best they can then this would generate between 10-40 gold a day of dailies for the communal guild bank funds.

Alternatively, though I don’t suggest it there could also be a subtractive % that is a true tax that automatically goes to the guild bank.  EVE-Online does this and I am sure there are others.

Rep requirement on contributions

I find it pathetic and shows the narrow minded scope that Blizzard has on how the player base interacts and what a “Player” not the character contributes to a guild.  What really annoys me about this is that if achievements for crafting/faction rep/”what ever else” are suppose to help differentiate guilds then all members of said guild should contribute to the achievement.  For example within the first couple of weeks of the expansion we had several guild crafter get to 525 but their efforts did not count because they were alts and were not leveling or running dungeons, so all effort by this player to level their craft for the guild did not count for shit towards the public recognition the guild’s overall efforts.  These were alts of officers and other heavily invested in the guild but according to Blizzard they were dead weight because the guild reputation system is fundamentally flawed.

Too few Reputation Gaining Actions

So while writing this post a thread appeared on the official forums, that I found via the blue tracker and front page of mmo-champion.  The original thread links are going to a not found page but a second thread has been started.

Wow I completely overlooked that a great idea while focusing on how the fix the current rep system without throwing the whole thing out.  A poster in the second thread makes a really great point that in the end it should be the GM and officers of a guild that decide what level of “Trust/Rep” a member should have.  Hell I even play have played EVE-Online and I did not think of it, but yes that is how the system should be.  If a guild wants to give away access to all that they have earned then that is a guild matter and not something Blizzard should piss with.  All of the rewards that are rep restricted should be changed to be a specific standing level that is not publicly viewable from the armory like rep but be something completely decided upon by the GM and Officers how the system should work in their respective guild.

I was going to recommend here that there also needs to be “Guild Daily” quests that players can run to gain rep with their guild and then some sort of system needed to be created to take the guild currency generated by these actions so that the GM and Officers could use said currency to buy stuff for the guild.  This was before reading the good forum posts highlighted by mmo-champion.  Now I just think the guild reputation system need to go the way of the Dodo because it is a dodo and just make it like the guild ranks and permission filters on the guild bank.  Hey if you don’t like how 1 guild does its perks that is one more reason and way for guild to differentiate themselves.

All in all travel in the new content is much better than it has been in previous levels of content. The thing is that travel between sections of content by level brackets for expansions leaves a bit to be desired. Travel from Outlands to Northrend sucks as it does not exist. Travel from 1-60 and Northrend is by boat only, so it sucks as well.

So all in all travel is good for current content and well is lacking for previous tiers of content, maybe when the redo Outlands and Northrend in future expansions we may see something interesting.

I completed my graph just before the 4.0.3a patch last Tuesday. It is lacking some of the Cataclysm flight points because Beta closed before I could get Lissanna to get me the flight information. So I have removed those nodes and edges from the graphs and have the ones I have been able to verify in. I don’t think I missed any edges or made mistakes but I may have. For comparison my old graph had between 11-18 flight points per continent in the Azeroth for Vanilla content or 1-60. Now each continent has around 30 or so nodes with many many more edges.

There was one flight connection I was very surprised was lacking and that was a connection between the new flight points in Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge.  As of my last attempt to use them you have to go from Iron Summit North to Thorium Point then South to Morgan’s Vigil then North again to Chiselgrip.  A better connection would just to have Chiselgrip and Iron Summit to connect directly.  This as the only one that seem like it was overlooked by Blizzard.

Now after the patch and then starting to read the thread about the removal of the portals on the official forums I got really annoyed and got snarky on the forums resulting in a 1 week ban.  Essentially I think it was calling all of the fanboys on the thread supporting Blizzard ass kissers but not sure which of my statement were inflaming enough for the ban.  Considering the fanboys were calling everyone that wanted the portals back names but lets not go there.  I also use to use stronger imagery on the old forums years ago than what I posted in that thread but what ever.  I can’t stand the official forums anymore anyway.  Just a cesspool of trolls, and yes I admit I am sometimes a troll there as well when I get annoyed enough to post.

Anyway with the portals removed for now.  There is a gaping hole in the travel system that needs filled.  There needs to be some sort of instant travel between the Capitol cities both Faction and Neutral.  This also allows for some more interesting solution than just opening up portals in SW to all the other major cities.

Lagarath and Lagaran were LAG#### because everyone went there for fast travel between expansions for what ever reason.  To get somewhere for training, farming, helping others what have you.  The point is the more ways to get player A to a location that player B is the better it is for the game.

So I have made another picture, it looks messier but I don’t have the inclination to clean it up with the tools I have readily available.

Here is the graph code for the differences between the two graphs.

	A_EK_EF_1 [label="Stormwind City"]
	A_KAL_AZI_1 [label="Exodar"]
	A_KAL_TDS_2 [label="Darnassus"]
	A_EK_DM_1 [label="Ironforge"]

	N_EK_CoS_1 [label="Booty Bay"]
	N_KAL_WS_1 [label="Everlook"]
	N_KAL_TAN_1 [label="Gadgetzan"]

	N_KAL_MG_1 [label="Moonglade Central"]
	N_KAL_SIL_1 [label="Cenarion Hold"]
	N_EK_WPL_2 [label="The Mender's Stead"]
	N_KAL_DS_2 [label="Karnum's Glade"]

	edge[color=red,weight=100.0,penwidth=1.25,len=4.0]
	A_EK_EF_1 -> A_KAL_AZI_1
	A_KAL_AZI_1 -> A_EK_DM_1
	A_EK_DM_1 -> A_KAL_TDS_2
	A_KAL_TDS_2 -> A_EK_EF_1

	N_EK_CoS_1 -> N_KAL_TAN_1
	N_KAL_TAN_1 -> N_KAL_WS_1
	N_KAL_WS_1 -> N_EK_CoS_1

	N_KAL_MG_1 -> N_EK_WPL_2
	N_EK_WPL_2 -> N_KAL_SIL_1
	N_KAL_SIL_1 -> N_KAL_DS_2
	N_KAL_DS_2 -> N_KAL_MG_1	

	edge[dir=none]
	N_EK_SG_2 -> N_EK_BS_1

So there are other opportunities as well. Looking at the new Hearthglen being part of the Argent Crusade it would be interesting to have a one direction portal loop between neutral faction locations. Place level restrictions on them so low level characters should not be able to get them early but for level cap or post level characters there is no good reason not to make some sort of fast travel available. I would hope not to have them tied to standing with the faction because that would be a pain in the ass for alts so level is really the only relevant restriction. Alternatively a single quest would also be good not a chain but just some simple action to unlock them after a certain level. Also making multiple loops as new content comes out would also be cool.

For example the Argent Tournament Grounds, Hearth Glen, some Argent Tournament location in Kalimdor. For the Cenarian factions having portals around Eastern Kindgom, Kalimdor, Outlands for the Expedition and something in Northrend (DEHTA) or in the Basin. I do not mind the portals being removed from Dalaran/Shattrath as long as something else is implemented that fills a similar role and the Boats/Trains/Planes do not count.