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Know Your Lore: The Molten Core
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. In the deepest parts of Blackrock Mountain, the Dark Iron toil relentlessly, slaving away at the whim of an ancient, terrifying master of flame. The Molten Core, as it is called by the denizens of Azeroth, is not this creature's home. Instead, it is the home of a dark ritual gone terribly wrong, a ritual that not only backfired, but subsequently resulted in the enslavement of an entire dwarven clan. The 10th anniversary of World of Warcraft has some extra special goodies this year, including an updated, 40man LFR version of the Molten Core. Although many players lurked in its depths in the original iteration of the raid, the story of the area and how it came to be was scattered all over Azeroth -- because the tale begins long before there were dwarves, clans, or anyone to call Blackrock Mountain by name.
WoW Archivist: The classic Molten Core experience, part 3
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? If you missed part 1 and part 2, that means you were late for the raid and we're docking you 50 DKP. Next time get here early to help the warlocks farm soul shards. OK, fellow archivists! We've cleared trash, we've decursed, we've pulled Geddon to Garr's room, we've brefriended the Duke, and we've doused every fiery rune. It's time to delve into the core of the Core to take on the Majordomo and Ragnaros himself, 2005 edition. The invincible majordomo Undefeated in battle, Executus rose through the ranks of Ragnaros's lieutenants to become the Firelord's majordomo. He did not appear until you doused all the runes, so the earliest raids on Molten Core had to stop after Golemagg and Sulfuron due to an Aqual Quintessence shortage. After raiders repped up with the Hydraxian Waterlords and could finally summon the Majordomo, they were faced with an invincible warrior -- literally. Executus could not be killed. His Aegis of Ragnaros spell gave him a 30K damage absorb buff and healed him to full, so it was pointless to DPS him. Instead, raids had to manage his eight adds: four Flamewaker Elites and four Flamewaker Healers. Mages were the key to this fight as they had the only reliable, long-term crowd control spell for humanoids. The fight required at least five tanks, one for the majordomo and one for each elite. All four healers were sheeped until all the elites were dead. Then the raid could kill the healers one at a time. But it wasn't that simple. The fight had some interesting complications.
All death knight team clears 25-man heroic Dragon Soul
Expansions come and expansions go, but death knights are eternal. It took cross-realm raiding to unite enough death knights into a cohesive team, but renowned DK solo artist Raegwyn has done it again, conquering 25-man heroic Dragon Soul with a team of death knights. Finding enough strongly geared English-speaking DKs appears to have been the primary challenge for Raegwyn and fellow death knight Valacar, who have already taken down heroic Ragnaros with an all-DK 10-man team. "Russians, Austrians, British (love zonestar ;D), Poland, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, France and and and ..." Raegwyn wrote on the YouTube posting of the event. "Pretty much any nationality was in this raid so leading this bunch of europeans was damn hard because i am as raidleader wasnt that good at english speaking myself." The group's main setup included: 4 tank blood DKs 17 DPS blood DKs 3 DC heal blood DKs (to assist tanks with Deathcoil Glyph) 1 DW frost DK (for buff) The team also called in a druid and priest for the Spine encounter to beat the dispell mechanic.
10 death knights kill heroic Ragnaros
You knew death knights were overpowered, right? Death knight gurus Raegwyn and Valacar took a team of 10 death knights and defeated the heroic version of 10-man Ragnaros. No healers, no casters with epics, just 10 amazingly badass death knights showing off their skills. Their raid composition was as follows: 1 frost DK 6 DPS blood DKs 3 tank blood DKs Raegwyn notes that the kill took six hours of wiping, but that's a small price to pay for this epic achievement. Take a look at some other accomplishments of his teams, including an all-death-knight clear of 10-man and 25-man Firelands, plus this interview we did with him back in February 2010. Meanwhile, 10 warlocks announced today that they were able to take down a bunny in Elwynn Forest. Grats all around!
Know Your Lore: Cataclysm for Dummies, Act II
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. So, Act I of our Cataclysm for Dummies guide went over the basics of Cataclysm -- how it came to be, just who that Deathwing guy is, anyway, and why he's so annoyed with the world in general. We also found out why we're going to all those new level 80 to 85 zones and, more importantly, why we're wandering around in three different raids in three completely different locations around the world. If you made it through the basics, congratulations! You're caught up through patch 4.0. But we're in patch 4.3, aren't we? And you've probably still got questions. Questions like: What's up with the troll dungeons -- didn't we kill those guys already? And why did we have to go fight Ragnaros again? Why is Thrall friendly as all get-out with the Dragon Aspects? Why do we have to do all this silly time travel? The good news is, by the time you're done reading this guide, you'll totally understand what Cataclysm is all about. Please note: There are spoilers here for the novel Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects. If you're still planning on reading it, you may want to do so before you hit this recap.
Raegwyn and friends claim first all-death-knight Firelands
Raegwyn, one of WoW Insider's favorite blood death knights (sorry, Daniel!), is at it again. The blood elf death knight of Onyxia (EU) holds a stunning array of previous solo kill achievements including The Lich King, Kael'thas Sunstrider (at level 80!), and two of the four bosses in heroic Stonecore. Now he's released a new video highlighting the ridiculously cool self-healing power of blood death knights -- except this time, rather than riding solo, Raegwyn brought along nine other blood death knight friends for an epic romp in Firelands. No healers, no DPS ... just 10 tanks. Part 1 of their adventure has the band of blooders facing off against heroic mode Rhyolith, Alysrazor, and Baleroc. My favorite moment of the video is at 7:30, when all 10 players simultaneously pop their Army of the Dead right before the pull. Part 2 includes normal Beth'tilac, heroic Shannox, normal Majordomo Staghelm, and the fiesty firelord himself. Some of the fun moments here are watching the sole surviving death knight tank Shannox for his last few hundred thousand hit points, and marveling at the talent of these 10 players on the incredibly high-magic-damage fight that is Ragnaros. As an enhancement shaman whose preferred form of making money is soloing old raids like Caverns of Time: Mt. Hyjal, Raegwyn's videos constantly both amaze and humble me. I get excited when I can manage to down Karazhan's chess encounter weekly, but Raegwyn is a player who constantly manages to push the boundaries of traditional playing, and I'm always excited to see what he has in store for us next. If you'd like to read more about Raegwyn's approach to soloing and what he considers to be the hardest aspects, check out Lisa Poisso's interview with him. Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!
Totem Talk: 2011 for restoration shaman
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how. Hard to believe that another year has come and gone, isn't it? It seems like only yesterday we were waiting in line for the Cataclysm to drop. Now we're at the end of the expansion, complete with the last raid tier and a battle for the survival of Azeroth against the aspect of death himself. But the new year has come, and it's a perfect time to look back on a rather full year of activity while we eagerly await the release of Mists of Pandaria. Tier 11: A slice of heaven The release of Cataclysm was something that was eagerly anticipated by a rather large number of players -- new talent trees, new spells and abilities, and a ton of new content. After making our way through the various dungeons and heroics, we set foot into the first tier of raid content for the expansion only to find out that we were pretty awesome. Using our new tools and tricks, we were able to destroy and outclass a lot of fights. Heroic Chimaeron was a perfect example of a fight in which restoration shaman just destroyed the competition and were heroes of a higher healing caliber. Tier 11 gave us a lot of opportunity to make use of our brand new mastery, Deep Healing, and not just use it but let it shine. Many of the boss fights had mechanics that would bring a large number of the raid members' health down to very low totals, allowing our Healing Rain and Earthliving Weapon proc to explode onto the scene. Magmaw, Chimaeron, and Halfus all had a ton of damage to heal through and really let us pour on the healing juice.
Know Your Lore: The top 10 lore reveals of Cataclysm, part 1
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. Spoilers for every single Cataclysm raid and zone to be found here. On the whole, Cataclysm has revealed a great deal of lore for the Warcraft universe. We've been to all four of the elemental planes and destabilized two of them by destroying the elemental lords who were effectively the dictatorial forces of their respective elementals. As of this writing, only Therazane remains as undisputed master of her elemental plane. (Indeed, with the destruction of Deathwing, she's actually in a stronger place than she was.) We've seen the Twilight's Hammer cult rise to world-shaking prominence and played a role in setting them back by destroying Cho'gall. We've finally managed to balk them on the eve of their Old God masters' final triumph by destroying Deathwing just as he was about to unleash an even more destructive assault on Azeroth than his first. The Dragon Aspects lost their immortality just after we discovered that there were actually safeguards in place to appoint new ones. We discovered the secret land of Uldum and its Titanic ruins, and we prevented the activation of the Halls of Origination at Deathwing's behest and discovered the connection between the Qiraji and Uldum. We also saw the war between the Alliance and Horde begin lurching toward a new phase. We discovered the fate of Gilneas and the Gilneans, saw tantalizing hints as to the development of the goblin people and their mysterious kajamite, and even more. It's been an eventful expansion in terms of what it established. For the next couple of weeks, I'm going to talk about where Cataclysm took us and what we discovered.
WoW Moviewatch: Hater Raid Firelands
Work warning: Mild cursing in this video, especially near the end. This is an odd combination of music, voice tracks, and raid video. Take the time to check it out, though; Molly did a surprisingly good job of pulling it all together when you consider it's her first video. It was fun to watch, reminiscent of the best parts of the Firelands, and the voice bits go well with the music. Molly created this video as an homage to her raid group. What I especially liked were the layers of player dialogue and WoW's acting. I think this is an interesting genre that could be further developed. If you're not sure about the song, alt-tab and do some web browsing while you let it play. The effect is relaxing while still engaging. My hat's off to Molly. (As a note, she did use Deadmau5's song for a background track.) Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.
1,000 guilds have killed heroic Ragnaros
GuildOx, one of the premier guild ranking and data sites for WoW raiding, reports that 1,000 guilds have defeated the heroic Ragnaros encounter in Firelands. This number represents 2% of the entire pool of active raiding guilds, as well as 4.2% of the guilds that are raiding heroic Firelands content. If that doesn't put things into perspective for you with regard to Blizzard's trying to make raiding more accessible, I don't know what will. Interestingly, 76% of the heroic Ragnaros kills have been completed in 10-man raids, with 24% of the kills in 25-man groups. Ten-man raiding has certainly made endgame raiding significantly more accessible, and 25-man only guilds seem to be struggling to keep their numbers as high as they once were, especially when the 10-man versions of the encounters are more accessible.
The Light and How to Swing It: Tanking the three intro heroic Firelands bosses
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a Blood Elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. So you've slain the minions and lieutenants of the Firelord and cast down Ragnaros himself, as well. The heroic versions of all seven bosses are now open to you, each with varying degrees of difficulty, starting with the walk-in-the-park Shannox to the much more dangerous remnants. These fights require you to step up your tanking game to a whole new level to survive everything the fights throw at you. In this column I'm going to start with the first three easiest heroic fights: Shannox, Majordomo Staghelm, and Alysrazor. I'll give you tips and tricks on proper cooldown usage, glyph load-outs, and trinket choices to maximize your performance against each so that you can stand up long enough for the raid to topple each.
Twice-weekly raid resets being tested in Taiwan and Korea starting this week
Here's some relatively crazy news that's just been posted on the Taiwanese Battle.net site: All patch 4.0 and 4.2 raid dungeons -- that is, every Cataclysm raid up to Firelands -- will reset twice a week, once on Thursday and once on Sunday. This change will not apply to the Deathwing raid, which will reset once a week as usual, nor will the weekly valor point cap be changing. The change is, according to the post, meant to allow people to gear up faster by killing bosses twice as often. There is currently no word on whether this will play solely to Taiwanese servers, or to all regions. If it does come to U.S. servers, it is likely our reset will revolve around Tuesday downtime, making the ideal second-reset day Friday. Check after the break for a quick and dirty Google translation of the post. UPDATE: Community Manager Zarhym has posted the following: 4.0 and 4.2 Raids to reset twice a week? The new raid lockout changes for Taiwan and Korea adjust the lockout timers for the patch 4.0 and 4.2 raids. The lockout timers for these raids will now reset twice weekly instead of once. These raid lockout changes are being made to allow players to raid more often and get more chances at epic loot drops. Players will be able to down current Cataclysm raid bosses twice a week, accelerating players' progression. We are testing these new raid lockout changes in Taiwan and Korea first. Our goal is to expand this change to other regions in the future, but we don't have anything further to announce at this time with regard to North American implementation. source
"There are no simple solutions" -- Design diversity in WoW
In a recent post on the forums, Bashiok responded to the idea that 1.35% of all WoW players have completed normal Firelands and what that does or does not mean for the recent changes implemented to the raid instance. It's a very interesting and information-filled post that I think deserves a thorough examination, as it reveals elements of Blizzard's current design philosophy and how and why it chooses to alter raids from their initial difficulty levels. I intend to go over the entire post carefully, but here are some highlights to ponder up front: The 1.35% number is just plain wrong. Blizzard has its own numbers that it's not going to share, but the 1.35% is probably as accurate as could be expected without access to Blizzard's internal data gathering. Blizzard's design intent is to make content for all of the playerbase. "It's both a blessing and a curse that the WoW player base is as large and diverse as it is." Players raid for many different reasons, some challenge, others loot, and others just to see the content. Some players are happy if they just see a boss once, while others enjoy weekly clearing. The idea of being willing to wipe a hundred or more times to clear a boss, a staple of the raider mentality for years, is not appealing to most players. OK, so now that we've picked out a few highlights, let's go over the entire post and really consider the implications of designing for as many players as possible.
Raid Rx: Preparing for heroic Firelands
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. After the earlier Firelands nerf, a number of guilds that had been struggling on some of the later bosses (Majordomo Staghelm and Ragnaros, for instance) have either cleared it out or are extremely close to doing so. With tier 13 content (and Deathwing) looming soon, it makes sense for leaders to maximize the equipment for raid groups. Healers are definitely not an exception. As a healer, you'll find that challenges will ... heat up. Anyway, this week you'll find a list of things you should know and keep in mind as you and your raid group start making headway into the next level of Firelands.
Totem Talk: Restoration tier 13 set bonuses and Firelands nerf
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how. So last week, we talked about the aesthetics of the shaman tier 13 set. It is a pretty good-looking set overall, and it was very nice to hear what the community had to say about it as a whole. You guys certainly offered quite a bit of insight into how you view the set. We also took some time to make some speculative guesses as to what we might see in the next patch in regards to shaman healing and even discussed how the developers looked at healing as a whole. Another week has come and gone, and it certainly has been full of excitement. We got our first glimpses of the restoration shaman two- and four-piece set bonuses for tier 13, and I thought we could take a moment today to talk about that as well as what the current tweaks to the Firelands raids mean for you as a restoration shaman. Oh, and in case you didn't see in Sunday's The Queue, that handsome dwarf shaman on the playing card is yours truly. I'll freely admit that I squeed a bit when I saw that arrive in my inbox.
The Light and How to Swing It: Overthrowing the Fire Lord
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Ragnaros, the Fire Lord, returns from vanilla WoW with a flaming vengeance as the last boss of the Firelands. Thanks to the recent hotfix nerfs or the culmination of weeks of hard work chipping away at the raid, many groups will be running up against Ragnaros for the first time and throwing their bodies at his waves upon waves of fiery doom. As a whole, the fight isn't particularly intensive to tank -- there's no real equivalent to Nefarian's add phase here for tanks -- but it's still going to be a challenge. This encounter is the ultimate "don't stand in bad" and will require your utmost attention to avoid being burnt to a crisp in an unfortunate moment of tunnel-visioning. Strap on those attention goggles, zip up that flame-retardant suit, and glyph that Divine Protection. We've got an elemental lord to cast down.
Raid Rx: Firelands nerfs
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. The great Firelands nerf has arrived! Those of you who have been struggling on progression bosses (normal mode or heroic mode) will no doubt have found that the the barriers have been lowered significantly. Good or bad, that's entirely up to you and your philosophy. On the one hand, content is now much more accessible. On the other hand, there are many of you who wish you had had more time to take down bosses pre-nerf. The overall nerf, though, changes several aspects of healing. I find myself not needing to work as hard. That doesn't necessarily mean not paying attention during a raid. With a lower amount of healing required (due to lower damage on several bosses), it just means fewer spells having to go out. Even though it might feel a little demoralizing to me, it is a little relieving in the sense that content can be seen more easily by players who normally wouldn't have been able to experience it. We'll go over my thoughts on this week, along with some ways to make healing engaging again.
Ol' Grumpy and the Goblet of Firelands adjustments
Hello. I'm Ol' Grumpy. You may remember me from such posts as Ol' Grumpy's first week with Patch 4.1, Ol' Grumpy's guide to player reeducation, or perhaps Ol' Grumpy's guide to outdated content and you. As my name suggests, I am a hilariously old and crotchety curmudgeon who probably has forgotten more about hating things than you've ever known. Seriously, I hate everything, especially the things I enjoy. It's why I'm called Ol' Grumpy and not Ol' Smiley. So, this time I've been called back into service to talk about the recent Firelands adjustments, or as I like to call them, significant nerfs. Quite frankly, my take on these is a bit more nuanced than the last time, so I sadly won't get to grump around as much as I prefer. Frankly, there are several key differences between this series of nerfs and the ones to T11 content that make the situation a little less cut-and-dried. This time, both normal and heroic content is being nerfed. Last time, normal mode fights were nerfed across the board, but heroic content was left unchanged so that people who wanted to experience it at the original challenge level could do so. This is a decision I lauded at the time, and I find the different implementation this time kind of baffling. We got half as much time with tier 12 as we did tier 11 before the changes. Now, to some degree this isn't an entirely fair comparison because we also had to level from 80 to 85 before we got a chance to do tier 11, and in addition there were 13 total fights in tier 11 content plus a bonus heroic only encounter. Tier 12 has eight, seven in Firelands and one in Baradin Hold that barely even counts. But it still seems very early to nerf this content. These are some serious nerfs to content that is still relevant. Unlike the T11 changes, which took place as T12 dropped, these fights are still the fights that we're all doing. There's nothing to replace them, no place for the players who have done it before the nerfs to go if they want to stay on the cutting edge of content. This is the cutting edge, and it's now between 15% and 25% less sharp. All of this adds up to my being not exactly angry or disappointed but very much confused by the reasoning for these changes. And it makes me wonder: Did fewer people clear Firelands than Blizzard was expecting? What's happening with this raid tier, and just how close are we to patch 4.3? Probably closer than I expected a week ago.
Blizzard announces first round of Firelands raid hotfixes
Blizzard recently announced that both the normal and heroic mode encounters in the Firelands would be rebalanced and nerfed over the coming weeks to make the raid tier more accessible to many raid groups. The nerfs and changes begin this week, with the first round of nerfs to make the raiding experience a bit less demanding. Normal difficulty bosses Shannox, Beth'tilac, and Rhyolith took 15% decreases to health and damage, whereas all of the other bosses in Firelands took a 25% hit. Certain trash packs have had their proverbial bite removed, and Alysrazor's tornadoes will now move more slowly. All adds in these encounters have had their health pools and damage decreased in the same proportions to their corresponding bosses'. On heroic difficulty, all bosses' health pools and damage, along with adds' corresponding health and damage, have been reduced by a blanket 15%, which is a huge nerf for heroic modes. Alysrazor also drops more feathers on both difficulty settings, and her Wings of Flame buff is now a static 30 seconds. While many players will be upset with these nerfs, I can only imagine the many raid groups that will happily charge forward to finally defeat the encounters that they have been banging their heads against for the better part of the patch. Blizzard has said that there will be more nerfs coming, as this is just the first round, so make use of this time to get as many of the bosses as you can while the getting is hot.
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution in the Firelands, part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. This week, Dan Desmond walks you through the Firelands. Before we delve into some strategies for dealing with another two bosses within the Firelord's domain, let's have some quick words about the most recent Censure hotfix. Yes, it's a marginal DPS increase, made even more marginal if you need to switch targets often and drop your stacks -- but the important thing is that Blizzard's working on it. Trust me, more buffs are coming. Last time, we covered some tips for dealing with Shannox and Lord Rhyolith. This week, we continue the two-for-one deal and bring you two very add-centric fights, Beth'tilac and Alysrazor.
