Filed under: NPCs

SPOILER WARNING: There is a spoiler behind the cut. Spoilers, generally defined, are hints or flat-out explanations of events in a story. Therefore, if you were to read behind the cut, you would get a hint or explanation about something happening in the Icecrown raids. I'm just warning you.

Zaneosak over on YouTube has put together a video that's pretty much a final conclusion to some things in the Icecrown Citadel in patch 3.3. Is it the final explanation? Well, let's take a look at the video behind the cut and then discuss it.

This one comes to us from @Aeire on Twitter, who said we should do this item, because it's "weird and different." True on both counts!

Name: The Mischief Maker (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)
Type: Uncommon Consumable
Damage/Speed: N/A
Attributes:

• It's a wand (though not really -- it's just an item you right-click to use up) that will sheep any friendly player or NPC, and unfortunately only in Dalaran. In other words, it's a party favor -- there's no real use to it, but if you happen to see your buddy wandering around Dalaran, you can sheep them for 15 seconds, and then wait for their "wtf?!" to roll in on guild chat.

Ever since Blizzard first revealed Deathwing to us back at BlizzCon, that image of the dragon and that jaw has stuck in my head -- dragons are always dangerous (you know what happens when you meddle in their affairs), but Deathwing is a dragon in his own class. And apparently that picture also stuck in artist Kymba's head, too, because she's been working on (and documenting on Livejournal) an awesome sculpture of the beast himself.

Obviously it's a work in progress, but Kymba has been doing a really thorough job covering just what she's doing with Sculpey (a brand of polymer clay). You can follow her own accounts on her Livejournal page (start over here), or check out the gallery below, in which we've compiled all of the pictures of the process so far. The jaw was made separately, and from what I can tell (I've never sculpted in my life), she used aluminum foil baked into the clay wrapped around a sturdier core. The whole thing looks great so far -- we can't wait to see what the finished product looks like.

Stay tuned -- you'll probably see it all done in a future World of Warcrafts post.

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Sam Raimi spoke with MTV News about his upcoming Warcraft movie, and while he didn't confirm (or deny, we guess) the whole subtitle thing, he did mention a new writer. Robert Rodat is apparently putting a screenplay together -- he's best known for writing Saving Private Ryan (and of course if we can get a Warcraft movie as good as that Spielbergian epic, we'll all be happy), and he's also penned Fly Away Home and The Patriot. Most recently, says his Wikipedia page, he did some work on 10,000 B.C., though if you saw that movie, you probably wouldn't be able to tell, anyway -- it was terrible.

Raimi says he wants to stay faithful "to the Horde and the Alliance and the mythology that takes place in the game," as well as "choose one or some of the lands that are portrayed in the game with as much accuracy and authenticity as possible." He calls Rodat a great character writer, and says a great character-based story within the world of Azeroth is his goal. Sounds good. The picture above is the only art we've ever seen of the movie (it was presented at BlizzCon a few years ago), but since then, it sounds like the movie has changed quite a bit, so we'll have to wait and see what Rodat and Raimi are coming up with.

Tyllendel's friend had an interesting reaction to the game when he first played it: he felt that all of the quest text was unbearable, and that he wanted to play the game rather than reading what NPCs told him. We've talked a little bit about this before -- obviously, when Blizzard kicked off WoW nearly five years ago, quest text was just the way quests were done, and while Blizzard has expanded the concept a bit since, it's still mostly the way MMOs work: you go to a character, talk to them, and they tell you where to go and what to do.

But I can see Tyl's friend's point: games are much less about telling these days and more about showing. You might understand how, if you've never played an MMO before, reading the quest text can take you right out of the game, rather than running off with an NPC or having the game show you rather than just tell you what to do. And Blizzard is getting there: later in the thread Slorkuz points out the recent Afrasiabi interview, and talks about how Alex mentions new ways of doing quests. For example, the quest team is trying to do a quest with no text, or direct players' attention without actually telling them, "look here." Text is the easiest and most basic way to help players accomplish goals, but as the game moves on, even the developers realize it's not the most elegant or immersive way to do it.

I don't necessarily agree with everything we highlight here on WoW.com, but just because a post seems wrong doesn't mean it isn't interesting to talk about. Such is the case with Loregy's latest post -- they suggest that after all is said and done, the much beloved (whoops, not) Garrosh Hellscream will end up at the wrong end of our weapons. They say that the big fight between Garrosh and Thrall (rudely interrupted by the Wrath of the Lich King) means that Garrosh is in for a whooping at some future point. Matt basically said as much in his post a while back -- Garrosh is a flawed hero, to say the least, and it's likely that sometime here, those flaws are going to catch up with him, possibly in the form of us players.

Now of course whether that's true or not is an entirely different question from whether that's what you want or not. Kisirani has already said that there are sides of Garrosh we haven't seen yet, and Blizzard could go either way with him -- either put him through some troubles and teach him to learn some lessons (right now the guy is pretty dumb), or do what Loregy is suggesting and turn him into a raid boss (wouldn't be the first faction leader with such a fate, to be honest). Personally, I think Garrosh is headed for a little redemption -- all he really needs, to my mind, is a little experience and humility, and, as I understand it, war can teach those pretty well.

Blizzard continues to leak out the official information about Icecrown (the raid, as you know, coming in patch 3.3), this time updating their Under Development site with official bios for Jaina Proudmoore and Sylvanas Windrunner, two ladies (one living, one not-so-much) that will likely have a large role in the fight against Arthas Menethil, better known as The Lich King.

Sylvanas, you'll remember, featured in the Lament of the Highborne video early on in BC, where the story of her death and resurrection at Arthas' hands made it clear she's got unfinished business with the onetime-paladin turned Lord of the Scourge. And Jaina... well, Jaina's had a front row seat to Arthas' undoing -- they were childhood friends who looked like they were headed towards being more than friends, until Arthas found a big bad sword that turned him into a big baddie. It's going to be awesome seeing all of these storylines start meeting up together in The Frozen Halls and the raid beyond -- we can't wait.

Ok, I'm going to make sort of a pretty geeky confession here: I have been known to read TV Tropes. In fact, I have been known to waste hours that could have been better spent writing (or raiding) reading TV Tropes.

For those of you who do not know what TV Tropes is, I'll explain in short: it's a wiki in which the contributors look for common themes and cliches present in modern pop culture and fiction, document them, and categorize them. Of course, rather than give the Tropes simple names, part of the fun seems to be giving your tropes fanciful and offbeat names. Big Lipped Alligator Moment, anyone? How about Contemplate our Navels?

As we reported the other week, Blizzard COO Paul Sams is now co-owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers (who are stepping up lately), and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette hit up Mr. Sams for a quick interview about being at the intersection of Azeroth and Steeler Nation. Turns out the man who collects everything Blizzard has also been a Steelers fan since he was four years old, even though he's from California. And we were right with all of the speculation: he got connected with the Steelers management through Legendary Pictures producer Thomas Tull, and when the chance came to own part of the franchise, he jumped.

They also talk about expanding out to Carnagie Mellon University -- Blizzard has a thriving educational program in Irvine, but Sams says that they are looking to expand that, so Pittsburgh is a possibility. And finally, he says that the Warcraft movie is being scripted at the moment -- Sam Raimi will do Spider-man 4, and then it's all Azeroth for him. In the meantime, let's see about getting some of this Steelers news in the game -- even if we can't get an epic football to toss around, surely we'll at least see a Tauren somewhere named "Bill COW-her," right?

There's quite a few Tauren fans on the WoW.com staff, and we've been having quite a few conversations about the new Tauren lore and their place in Cataclysm, so you can bet this new discovery has us all atwitter. What could it mean though? There's a few possibilities.

We've had some requests for husky loot lately, and so here's an item that isn't quite phat these days (just a little husky), but used to be quite interesting.

Name: Ancient Hakkari Manslayer (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDB)
Type: Epic One-hand Axe
Damage/Speed: 69 - 130 / 2.00 (49.8 DPS)
Attributes:

• This is how you can tell this weapon is old-school: it has just one bit of green text, and that text is "Steals 48-54 life from target enemy."
• Which doesn't, on its face, sound quite that nice. But at the time this weapon was current (ye olde patch 1.7), that was a hot proc. Because the proc actually scaled along with spell damage -- if you had 150 spell damage, and this proc hit, you wounded the enemy for 150 shadow damage, while healing yourself with same.

Obviously, if you've been paying attention to what players are saying about Garrosh Hellscream, confidence isn't high in the guy. Especially if, as rumored, he's going to be getting a promotion very soon. But lest your fears about the guy are overtaking your Horde pride, just wait -- Kisirani says that we haven't learned all there is to know about the son of Grom. He may yet show a more palatable side, as we're told that we "haven't seen the entirety of who Garrosh is."

And what better place to do that, she continues, than in the run up to Cataclysm. We already know there's going to be a world event, but Kisirani hints yet again that it's going to be quite sizable -- considering that she mentions it between Icecrown and the expansion release itself, we could just be talking about a whole content patch on its own. However it all plays out, it's quite clear that Icecrown is definitely not the end of this round of content, and the world we'll be playing in when Cataclysm actually releases will be very different than the one we know today.