With 5.4 we will be getting Virtual Realms. That is a clever way of merging a two (or more) realms without actually merging them. This is a clever solution as it keeps each realm's identity without having the bad press surrounding realm mergers which would undoubtedly have the naysayers proclaiming WoW was dying. But is it that? Is there more to this than meets the eye? I'm not sure to be honest. But I will share my thoughts with on this as it is liable to be a major talking point until it does go live, and probably beyond that too.

Rygarius - Patch 5.4 Coming Soon!

Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests.

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Before I go further, I need to define the use of the word server and realm in my discussion below.

• Server: This is a large computer that Blizzard use to host the files so we can play the game. It is NOT the place your character calls home (e.g. Shadowsong EU in my case).
• Realm: This is  the place your character calls home (e.g. Shadowsong EU in my case).

Lets take a look at some of the problems and concerns that such a change will bring, and their potential solutions:

The vitualisation of realms where the same faction imbalance exists:

An unfounded concern I suspect because while Blizzard may make what weem to some as a stupid decision they really will know best in most situations and this feature is being implemented to resolve this very issue not exaggerate it. I am also hoping that this will not only apply to low pop realms as there are high population realms that would also benefit from being virtualised with a high pop realm with the opposite faction imbalance. Two realms I know of that would benefit this way are Kazzak and Silvermoon on the EU side of things.

Duplication of character names would cause chaos in chat and the mail system:

This is possibly one of the biggest headaches that Blizzard will have to resolve. But we work things out in real life quite easily (sadly not 100% perfectly) by using other identifiers like surnames and geographical identifiers. Warcraft already limits us to a unique first name on our realm and that realm is also unique within our region so that process is made easier as the addition of our realm name as a last name makes that also unique. So a mail being sent to evlyxx@shadowsong.eu is always going to end up coming to me whereas a mail sent to evlyxx@illidan.us would never reach me. 

It does however mean that we, the players, need to adapt and also that Blizzard help us by making the relevant changes to the UI to force us to change.

The merging of the auction houses will ruin the economies on the realms:

Not sure that ruin is the right term but it will change the way the auction house looks on virtualised realms. Buyers will end up with more choice of who to buy from which is good if you're on the wrong end of a realm faction imbalance or generally on a low pop realm. The other good news here is that folks on low pop realms will actually see certain items on their AH.

The flip side is of course that sellers will face more competition when selling their wares, but they will also have more customers and markets. Unless the sellers are greedy or stupid will result in more sales which surely isn't a bad thing. 

People who selected a PVP realm and joined the majority faction specifically to avoid ganking will now have to worry about PVP:

Life is hard and when you sign up for a PVP realm you know the rules. What would happen if the faction balance switched naturally? This could also be resolved if Blizzard allowed a month of free realm transfers from PVP realms to PVE or a heavily discounted "move all toons" option (buy 1 get 10 free?).

No single server in the world can hold the population to play ALL that content from lvl 1 to 90 in hundreds of zones and dungeons:

No single server has done that even back in Vanilla there were instance servers, servers for Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor and even chat servers. Hence the term "world server is down" during the AQ Gates opening for players on Kalimdor while Eastern Kingdoms based players continued on without issue.

I'm sure that now there are at least 1 physical server per continent and the way CRZ works makes me suspect that this may be even localised to zones.

Working as a server admin for a telecoms co we have virtual servers that can function seamlessly as the virtual server moves from one physical server to another in order to address performance issues. This is just an extension of this technology and as the world is progressing into cloud based virtual servers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vblock) Blizzard are most likely just moving to the same tech.

The servers Blizzard use may not cope with the load:

I doubt the hardware WoW is run on would be taxed by such a merger. After all servers like Blackmoore EU (40k total pop) and Stormrage US (53k pop) don't struggle now and they are the most populated EU and US realms. Stormrage also has a 99% Alliance player base so the load is all imbalanced there.

Also note the answer above.

It will mess up server progression lists for raiding guilds:

Yes it will, but does this really matter? All it will lead to is more highly progressed raiding guilds on the virtual realms. It will also mean that guilds can easier to recruit the right calibre of player for their raid team

Blizzard are just doing this to avoid realm mergers:

Any announcement of realm merger would create drama both on the realms to be impacted as well as a load of bad press. Blizzard quite rightly don't want either and as the world is moving to Cloud computing Blizzard are just bring the same tech into WoW.

However, I'm hopeful that this move is only the beginning of the future. With cross realm zones and now virtual realms we are moving closer and closer to the ultimate of having a single unified Azeroth. OK so with 4 different rule sets that is never truly likely to happen but I do firmly believe that the next step (if it isn't this one) is to have 4 virtual realms in each region (PVE, PVP, RP and RP-PVP) before we end up with the same 4 realms globally.

Personally I welcome the change, and I'm hoping that there is a way of getting my Horde character and Alliance character on the same virtual realm if only so I can share my account bound items with them as currently my Alliance characters are all on Shadowsong EU (PVE) and my Horde are on Defias Brotherhood EU (RP-PVP).

Do you think that virtual realms are a good thing? What excites you about virtual realms? What scares you about virtual realms? Where will it all end?

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Today is the coming of 5.3 and like most other classes, us priests haven't been left alone this patch. Discipline has been nerfed slightly once again as Atonement heals now only heal for 90% of the damage instead of 100%, but Penance does heal for 10% more but the cost of this is 10% reduction in damage done, also the Glyph of Smite no longer transfers the 20% extra damage dealt by Smite to healing via Atonement. The other Disc change is that Borrowed Time now causes the next spell to be cast/channeled 15% faster not applying a 15% haste boost, which sounds like a buff rather than a nerf.

Holy/Shadow priests in 25 man groups will now see Divine Hymn/Vampiric Embrace cap at heal 12 targets while 10 man group will remain capped at 6 players.

Disc and Holy both get changes to Mass Dispel as it now has a flat cast time of 0.5seconds which means the Glyph of Mass Dispel is is to be changed to dispel buffs/debuffs that are normally undispellable, which was previously a feature of the spell. As a PVE priest that is a buff as it now means the glyph is only needed for PvP.

Whilst talking about PVP, has received a makeover. Healing priests get a 1 minute reduction to the previously 6 minute cooldown while shadow priests get a 4 minute increase to 10 mins on the CD which place the spell into the category of no longer being usable while in Arenas or Rated Battlegrounds.

For our shadowy brethren, there is only one other change, a fix to the Glyph of Mind Flay's movement speed increase bug as this was not stacking correctly.

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So Blizz have finally announced a date for 5.3, tomorrow! I'm sad it wasn't a week earlier so they did something on my birthday but hey I'm not one to complain about new content.

What am I looking forward to most in 5.3? Well to be honest the patch hasn't interested me until today so what follows is my initial views of the content without having seen any of, so things may well change!

New battleground and arena venues are always a welcome addition, it gives me some more achievements that I'll not stand a hope of hell of getting and gives me something to whine about when trying to keep up in the achievement race with with Artherion, damn him and his PVP prowess. 

Then of course we have some new scenarios and some heroic scenarios too, as a healer though I am worried that there may be no place for me in these heroic scenario groups unless I choose to go shadow or want to be missing out on the challenging times/goals they have built in. I must admit when I heard of scenarios coming to the game I was over joyed as I thought these would be a replacement for the old epic quests we had way back. Sadly my hopes were dashed when they arrived and were basically little more than 3 man dungeons for level capped players. They could be so much more if they were available to players of all levels. I@m hoping things may change as time passes but for me they leave a lot to be desired.

There will sadly be no more 5 mans this expansion, I am saddened by this especially as I was hoping for some extra challenge mode dungeons. I guess they will come in 6.0. While talking about Challenge Modes, there is now a Fail Bag as a reward for doing the daily quest. This item has a chance to drop ilvl 516 items like Immaculate Pandaren Wand or just the usual 28g.

The storyline continuation is of great interest to me and I'll be heading off to the Barrens to see what the heck is going on there. Having max level toons on both factions I can get the full story although being primarily Alliance I think I'll be on the weaker side of that story for most of the time. 

The continuation of the Wrathion questline is also of great interest and I'm hoping that it actually starts to get interesting rather than more "go get lucky in LFR with drops to get the next item". Why can't we have more questing like we had with the Lion's Landing back in 5.1? Here's hoping for something along those lines in 5.3.

There are, as always, a whole load of class changes, the generic one of interest is that intelligent heals will now prefer the most needy players and pets will have a lower priority than players. I will be doing a separate post on the priest changes tomorrow.

The biggest list of changes though goes to Pet Battles. The notable changes are are:

• Pet Battle dues can now be watched by non competing players;
• Battle pets' recent ability loadouts will now be saved when pets are swapped in and out of battle slots;
• New pet drops in the Throne of Thunder, the Thunder Isle and Northrend;
• New pet drops in Burning Crusade raid dungeons;
• Pet Battle daily quests on Pandaria, Beasts of Fable and Spirit Tamer quests will award experience, valor, and Lesser Charms of Good Fortune;

Loot drops in Raid Finder can now be assigned to an off spec rather than the spec you have queued for. This is great especially as it means I can now queue as healer on Evlyxx and get DPS drops for my off-spec. I guess the theory is that hybrid classes are more likely to queue as healer in order to get faster queues, so expect a whole load of under geared healers in your Raid Finder groups.

Then there is the fix to one of my biggest bugbears in this expansion random loot drops and the bonus roll which is going to be weighted so every time you fail to win anything on a boss you're more likely to win next time than you were before. With my track record on world boss kills (including bonus rolls) of 44 chances of loot on the Sha of Anger and 8 chances on Nalak and I have only won 2 items (T14 legs on the same kill of the Sha after I had purchased 522 legs from the Shado Pan Assault) I'm hoping to get some success at last and get a tier set bonus active.

In PvP there have been massive changes. Resilience has been removed from all armour and players nw have 65% resilience regardless of armour worn. However, items that previously had resilience now have extra PvP Power. I am really not sure how this changes anything as PvP will still heavily favour those folks with gear as PvE geared players will still have their damage nerfed hard compared to PvP equipped players, but lets wait and see before we condemn it. Also when entering a PvP arena all gear will be scaled down to ilvl 496 (gear of lower ilvl will NOT be scaled up though).

The Brawler's Guild has had a few more levels added to it, /whoop I don't know of anyone that partakes in this anymore most folks got their pass and a few levels then stopped way before they hit max level. Maybe the mount reward will motivate some more folks to try it out and stick with it.

The void binders are back which means more upgrades for your BiS items this only affects PvE gear as PvP gear is capped at ilvl 496 anyway although the old Dreadful and Malevolent gear can still be upgraded but to be honest, the honor is better spent buying new gear that will be of higher ilvl than even the upgraded items.

Lastly, the best additions in the patch are that the experience to level from 85-90 has been reduced by 33% at each level and the Golden Lotus rep gate has been removed. Finally the expansion is looking alt friendly.

My final words, are concerning the change that we didn't get. Motes/Spirits of Harmony remain soulbound, why the heck aren't these Bind on Account yet. I have loads of them on toons that have no use for them and none on toons that do. Damn you Blizzard!

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