Cheating on WoW: Ah, Screw It Edition:

We all know this is a boring time in WoW. Content that we once loved has become stale after a year or more of play. I’ve been sorely tempted to splurge on Guild Wars 2 or The Secret World to tide me over, but I decided it didn’t make sense to buy a game just to fill time for a week or two until Mists of Pandaria is released.

So anyway, meet my Norn thief:

I have all the self-control of a dog in a kibble factory…

On the plus side, it’s not a subscription game, so I don’t need to worry about wasting money by juggling it and WoW.

It’s too early for me to add much to my thoughts on the game from beta, but I will say this much: I spent an hour on the character creation screen, designing her appearance, clothes, personality, and backstory. Not even Aion caused me to agonize that much. And now all my gold is going to buying dyes at the trading post.

Also, the Norn starting area is awesome. I particularly liked the events around the Wolf Shrine.

In other news…

Did Blizzard just prank World of Warcraft players?

It’s already been hotfixed, but for a brief time a few days ago, death knights were able to cast their diseases on anyone — even friendly targets.

The result was a world-wide Azerothian pandemic the likes of which has not been seen since the Wrath of the Lich King launch event, or even the infamous corrupted blood incident.

The really odd thing about this is that it took place almost exactly seven years to the day after the corrupted blood pandemic — which, by the way, was the inspiration for the death knight blood plague ability.

Hmm…

I see what you did there, Blizzard.

I’m only sorry I missed it.

Heart of the Swarm beta update:

It’s not my intention to cover every patch and balance change in the Heart of the Swarm beta, but the last patch had some pretty massive changes, so I need to make a mention of it.

Firstly, one of the new Terran units, the warhound, has been removed. They’re not ruling out that it might return, but if it does, it will likely be in a heavily changed state.

This decision isn’t hard to understand. The warhound was in that rare niche where it was both brokenly overpowered and extremely boring. It dominated everything on the ground, but it was essentially just a marauder on steroids. It brought nothing new or exciting to the table and required little if any micro to use effectively.

I fully agree with Blizzard’s reasoning in this case, and as a Protoss player, I can only smile as one of our worst nightmares meets its end. But at the same time, I will miss the whole “mech warrior” aesthetic of warhound armies, and poor Terran players are only getting two new units now — one of which is just a new form for an old unit.

As one unit falls, another rises. The best news by far to come out of this patch — indeed, the entire beta so far — is that the carrier has been reimplemented.

Rejoice, Protoss: carrier has arrived in Heart of Swarm.

This makes me giddy with happiness. As you know, I adore the carrier, and I’ve spent plenty of time raging over its removal.

We can hope this will lead to Blizzard finally trying to make the carrier a more viable unit — it has received an impressive total of zero patch changes since Starcraft II launched. But even if it doesn’t, I’m still happy. HotS is an expansion. It shouldn’t shrink your unit choices.