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Requiring epic achievements for normal runs
Leafshine echoes a concern I've heard a lot around the community and even here on WoW.com lately: why are some Naxx pickup group organizers requiring the epic achievement on characters joining the raid when they're only running Naxx 10? Sure, we'd all love to have raids full of epic characters, but when you consider that to even get that gear, you have to topple Naxx 25, it seems a little silly to require a raid full of characters that don't actually need the run you're going on.Then again, you could (and probably do) subscribe to the "free market" theory of PuGing: if you think that's silly, don't join that raid, and eventually people who want those requirements won't have anyone to run with (and if they do have people to run with, then apparently even those who have conquered Naxx 25 still want to go back and run 10, for fun or badges or offspec gear or whatever). But that does leave out people who really do need to (and can) run the instances -- just because you don't have a character full of gear from Naxx 25 doesn't mean you can't perform respectably in Naxx 10.
Guildwatch: He's really, really sorry
You've got to hear this guy included in our drama section this week -- he accidentally ninja'd a piece of loot, and he was so sorry that he not only apologized on the forums, he actually made some YouTube videos to apologize in virtual person. And they are terrific -- the music is amazing, and he just keeps talking and talking and talking. We could listen to him all day, actually. Definitely check it out.That story and many more in this week's Guildwatch, back up to full strength after a short version last week. If you have drama, downed or recruiting tips to share with us from around the realms, send them right along to guildwatch@wow.com. Click the link below to read on.
Guildwatch: Min-E3 edition
Apologies for this week -- I'm at E3 working like crazy, and Guildwatch has ended up on the low priority list. But I'm not going to leave you with nothing: though it's a little shorter than normal, we've still got your downed, recruiting, and dramatic news of the week. Click below to read on, and we'll be back to full strength next week.Got more tips for us? Just send them along to guildwatch@wow.com, and you might see them right here soon.
Phat Loot Phriday: Nurturing Touch
This is a crazy-looking wand from Ulduar that spits out Holy damage like nobody's business.Name: Nurturing Touch (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)Type: Epic WandDamage/Speed: 378-702 / 1.80 (300 DPS)Attributes: +29 Stamina, +26 Intellect, and +24 Spirit Improves crit strike rating by 20, and spell power by 39 Pretty straightforward wand -- nothing too special about it. But it is a nice one, and it's likely an upgrade from anything you've gotten in Naxx or the earlier raid instances. %Gallery-33600%
Guildwatch: Ninjas are mammals
Lots of great guild news in this week's column -- many guilds, like OpEx above, from Scilla, are making their way through Ulduar and dropping lots of bosses as they go by. And many more guilds are recruiting: way more, unfortunately, than we have space for in this column. Business is booming if you're a raiding guild, apparently, and we have a feeling that's exactly what Blizzard planned.There's also drama in this week's GW, as there is every week, and don't worry: we included the rap battle. Don't miss that one. If you've got tips for us about drama, downed news, or recruiting (though we are still overflowing on recruiting -- at this point, you're probably better off just on your realm forums), send us an email at wowguildwatch@gmail.com. Click the link below to read on.
Guildwatch: Bad form
The shot above actually takes place after Rigged denied instance-ninja'ing the last two bosses of Naxx... until his guild found out that, according to his achievements, he really had taken their kills earlier that day. Strange how all of a sudden plenty of justifications (Naxx is easy, it was only two bosses, "I was bored") jump to mind after he's caught, when before all he could do was deny it ever happened.That story and more in this week's Guildwatch, which you can click the "read more" link below to read. If you've got tips about guild drama, downed (especially downed -- we could use lots more good Ulduar news), or recruiting notices, make sure to put it in the format you see below and send it along to guildwatch@wowinsider.com (yes, we're still working on getting that email address changed to wow.com, give it time). And in the future, you could see those tips right here.
One Shots: "Almost" only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades
There's something to be said for tackling a raid encounter, playing hard, and defeating the boss in your favorite MMO. (Assuming, of course, if has endgame raiding.) There's also something extra-special about getting the boss down the first time. However, the mark of truly enjoying a game is whether or not you can laugh off all the wipes getting to that point or not. Today's World of Warcraft One Shots comes from Nakirush, who appears to have the right, rather silly, attitude about death. Nakirush writes in to explain this shot: Our brave tank charges Sapphiron as we come to the end of Naxxramas. Blades slice the air and magic pours out wildly. The battle was nearly won, we were nearly victorious. Then we died. We love to see screens from MMOs both big and small, but we need you to send them in! It's really easy to do - just drop an email to oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name and a quick description. We'll post it out here for everyone to check out, and give you the credit.%Gallery-9798%
Defining "PuGgable"
Alan over on WoW LJ has a great question: just what is PuGgable? Lots of people are talking about Naxx and Vault of Archavon and Obsidian Sanctum as PuGable, or able to be taken down by a pickup group, but just where does the line get drawn? Is 25-man Naxx able to be killed by a PuG? Sarth with three drakes? Ulduar?Most of the 10-man instances are generally easy enough to be dropped by a pickup group, in my experience, though probably not for the achievements. A well-geared PuG can roll right through Naxx or VoA without any problems at all. But when you start getting into the achievements (Sarth with drakes) or the higher content (Eye of Eternity is tough unless everyone in there is experienced), then things get a little shady. Which is why lots of PuG leaders will be checking gear and achievements -- they'd rather take along someone who's already done the content than worry about pulling newbies through. Services and reputations can help that a little bit too -- a good friends list can come in very handy for PuGging even hard content.And I'd say Ulduar is not PuGgable, yet, for a number of reasons. First of all, it's brand new, which means that most pickup folks won't know the fights, and that leads to wipes and only about one or two bosses down. Plus, since it is so new, every raid reset counts, and guilds don't want their raiders using up their resets when there's a guild run later in the week (of course that's not an issue for Naxx, which most guilds have on farm anyway). Though as more people gear up and more guilds make progress in Ulduar, you have to think there'll be PuGs in there as well
The limits of Video Mode Ultra
I think I've found the limits of Video Mode Ultra -- when we first hard in the 3.1 patch notes that Blizzard was adding in a superspecial video mode for high-end computers to use, I was excited. I just recently "updated" my PC (read: "it broke and I had to spend a lot of time and money to fix it"), and it's been running like butter, so I was interested in putting it to the test. The day after the patch dropped, I flipped the switch to Ultra, and had no problems -- until this past Saturday. While wandering around Dalaran, I noticed my framerate had dropped quite a bit. I lowered a couple of the environmental settings just a bit and I was fine again, but apparently even with a 2.5 GHz quad core CPU, 4gb of RAM, and a GeForce 9600GT, Video Mode Ultra is still just a little too hardcore for me.What's interesting is that I ran Wintergrasp a few times before having those slowdowns in Dalaran, and never had a problem. But then again, Blizzard did say that they had spent a lot of time making sure Wintergrasp was streamlined enough to run huge battles with minimal slowdown, so maybe Dalaran didn't get that same makeover. And I should say as well that I had no issues anywhere else in the world -- even my Naxx run the other evening looked perfect with Ultra flipped on.Having a "future" graphics mode on PC games is nothing new -- for most games, the highest graphics setting is usually "experimental," so there's a little leeway in terms of release time (the game looks good with current hardware, but even better with next year's gear). And Video Mode Ultra is just that -- Blizzard trying to send a shot across the bow at those who are already saying the graphics look a little dated.
Blood Pact: Warlock tips for Naxx-10 part 2
It's time again for Blood Pact, your weekly Warlock column, detailing the dastardly deeds of Warcraft's demonologists! Nick Whelan returns once again this week, to finish what he started. And this time, it's personal!Last week, I wrote a column filled with tips for Naxx-10. Specifically, tips for Warlocks, because that's who Blood Pact is written for. But my list ended up being so long that I was only able to write about the Spider and Plague wings of Naxx before the article started to feel a little bloated. So I chopped it in half, and now it's time to conclude our tour of the dread citadel with the more difficult sections of the instance: the Construct, Military, and Frost wings!
[Updated] Blood Pact: Warlock tips for Naxx-10 part 1
The time for Blood Pact has come again! This week, we delve into the dread citadel itself, the very stronghold of mighty Kel'Thuzad's power: Naxxramas! Following meekly behind the rest of the group, documenting his experiences for your entertainment, is Nick Whelan. With Ulduar getting closer every day, I thought this would be a perfectly inappropriate time to write up some helpful hints for all the Warlocks out there who are clad primarily in pre-raiding gear, and would like to start moving forward with their progression. This post is aimed toward helping Warlocks who haven't done much raiding in the past, and would like to try it out now that Blizz has made it so much more accessible. Furthermore, since it's unlikely that such a person has a spot waiting for them in a group which full clears weekly, I also assume in this post that the rest of the people in the raid are similarly geared. By using these tips, new raiders will be doing their part to ensure that their group gets a full clear as soon as possible. This guide isn't meant as a substitute to an overall Naxx guide. For something like that, be sure to take a look at Ready Check. Rather, this guide is intended to cover the information specific to Warlocks which won't be included in the raid leader's pre-boss explanations. As such, some of this information might be difficult to decipher if you've never participated in the fight before. I would recommend reading Ready Check's Naxx guides first, or even just referencing this page right before the start of a boss fight.
Spiritual Guidance: Controlling heroic Razuvious
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. Need help with heroic Razuvious? Matt's here to help! I've received a lot of emails and requests for help regarding the heroic Razuvious encounter. It's a unique encounter in that Priests have to mind control mobs in order to to tank successfully.
Spiritual Guidance: The Undying experience of a Priest
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. This week Matt offers some tips and insights for the Priest aiming to go after the Undying title! I wanted to share some thoughts and tips this week on a successful Undying run I participated in with my guild. It continues to be one of the most challenging achievements in the game. To put it bluntly your entire raid group must navigate and clear out every encounter in Naxxramas without dying to any of the bosses. The amount of coordination, luck and skill needed is high. Remember that dying on trash is perfectly okay. It's the bosses where you can't afford to lose players on. But I want to let you all in on a secret. There's a trick to earning the Undying.
Naxxramas gear by type
Tobold has a post up with an interesting analysis of all the epic loot that drops in the ten-man version of Naxxramas, broken down by armor type and by broad stat type (tank, melee, caster). At the top of this post is a chart I made from his armor type breakdown ("Other" is anything that's not cloth, leather, mail, or plate, i.e. weapons, off-hands, shields, jewelry, and cloaks). As Tobold mentions, this confirms that there is significantly more plate than anything else, about 50% more, even though there are the same number of plate classes as cloth classes. My guess is that this is because they expected an influx of DKs bumping up the plate numbers. As far as stat types, leather and mail are both split half-and-half for caster vs melee. This is a little iffy. In both cases, there are two caster specs (Balance and Resto Druid, Elemental and Resto Shaman) out of six total specs (Druids and Rogues, Shamans and Hunters), so it seems a 33/66 split would make more sense, but maybe they just wanted to keep it simple. The case that really bothers me is plate, which is split evenly between caster, tank, and DPS (see right). The only plate spec that wants caster gear is the Holy Paladin. That's one of three specs from one of three plate-wearing classes, and yet it gets a third of the plate gear. I'm sorry, my plate-clad healing brethren, but that's just not an equitable proportion. Mostly it just means that our prot pallies have full healing sets and we're still disenchanting a good chunk of the plate every week. Here's hoping we see less caster leather, mail, and especially plate in Ulduar.
15 Minutes of Fame: Solo healing Naxx 10
15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about."I realise that I'm not the first person to do this, but I figured it was worth a post regardless," Prrancer begins his recent post on the EU Priest forums, "mostly because I keep seeing people insisting that it's impossible without an offhealer. So here it is: I solo healed the entire Naxxramas without anyone helping on any fight. "Okay, that's a lie. We had Vampiric Embrace, and we used Judgement of Light on Sapphiron -- only Sapphiron, though. But neither our Boomkin, Enhancement Shaman or Shadowpriest cast a heal at any point during combat. The Protection Paladin did use LoH twice, although he didn't have to. (He just forgets to use Lightwell.)"Thus begins the story of Prrancer of Liquid Courage on Jaedenar-EU (H). This is a player who likes to push the limits – and from the looks of things, he's doing a darn fine job of it.
The Daily Quest: Of Spirit Beasts, Fury Warriors and Rupture-less Rogues
We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. BigRedKitty has video of Gondria the new Spirit Beast on the PTR. He explores the talents of the rare beast and shows it in action. Part Time Druid spends time with on his Warrior and comes back with Five Rules for the Fresh Fury Warrior. He mostly covers how to increase DPS on raids, but has leveling advice as well. Zaltu at One Rogue's Journey takes a question from a reader about the viability of a Rupture-less Mutilate and impact of the Patch 3.1 Rogue Glyphs currently on the PTR. Just My Two Coppers has advice for those who play the Auction House on crowded servers. OutDPS posts the third in their three part series of using Hunter traps to deal with each boss in Naxx. This installment covers Gluth and Grobbulus. Submit a guide, post, podcast or resource for inclusion in TDQ, by using our tip line and we'll consider it for a future TDQ post.
Phat Loot Phriday: Cowl of Sheet Lightning
Lots of the endgame cloth headpieces look the same actually, but it's a good look -- the pointy head, the glowing eyes. And nothing says power than a name like "sheet lightning."Name: Cowl of Sheet Lightning (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDigger)Type: Epic Cloth HeadArmor: 244Attributes: +67 Stamina, +68 Intellect Meta and a Yellow socket, with a socket bonus of +9 spell power Improves Haste rating by 48, and spellpower by 85 %Gallery-33600%
Introducing WoW Insider's Guild of the Month contest
Think your guild is one of the best in all of the World of Warcraft? Have you dominated your server since vanilla WoW, or run a packed RP event every week for years? Are you leading one of the biggest guilds in the game, running group after group through Naxx without any drama or wipes? Think your guild is awesome? Prove it!WoW Insider is proud to present our brand new Guild of the Month contest. Each month, we'll be choosing a guild from the game who impresses us through performance in raiding, originality in what they do as a group, or just plain old community (because casual guilds need love, too). And the winner will not only get profiled here on the site as our Guild of the Month, but they'll also get a $100 gift certificate to Warcraft.Swagdog.com, where they'll be able to pick up custom-made guild shirts for the top members of the guild.To nominate your guild, just send a short message (no longer than 200 words, please) to guildofthemonth@gmail.com stating why your guild should be chosen as a winner. Make sure to tell us why your guild stands out from the rest -- you don't have to have conquered all of the raid content, but you do have to be doing something extraordinary and special with your little ingame community. Every month, we'll choose a winner from those entries, and profile them here on the site (so don't enter if you don't want to get profiled), as well as award them the gift certificate from the kind folks at Swagdog. More rules after the break:
Raid Rx: 3 steps to assigning healing roles
Raid Rx has returned from retirement! Every Thursday (usually), Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. This week we're going to cover the steps in figuring out who heals who! Last week I looked at addons for the healing lead. I suggested using a combination of macros and addons like Surgeon General. But what about the actual logic and process of assigning healers themselves? As in deciding who covers who? That's a much more trickier process that comes with time and experience. I'll share some of the basic mindsets here. This week's Raid Rx is inspired by a topic from Plusheal. When assigning healers, I try to have a general idea of what the players and the classes excel at. I keep that in mind when picking out the healers and tanks.
Ulduar vehicles will scale with gear
Here's a little consolation to those of you, like Eliah, concerned about the Ulduar vehicle fights: Unlike some of the other vehicle fights in the game already, Daelo says on the forums that the vehicles in the next raid will actually scale with gear. He says someone in blues will have a much harder time in the vehicles than someone kitted out in Naxx gear.Personally, I've only done Oculus, but I do agree with Eliah that putting us in vehicles takes away a lot of the achievement we've gained by leveling and questing -- it's not fun to fail on a boss just because you're trying to deal with a whole new set of abilities you've had no control over until you jumped in the driver's seat. But the fact that the Ulduar vehicles will scale helps a little bit -- players were concerned that every time you went in there, it'd be the same fight, but with new gear that should change. And obviously Blizzard has heard the concerns about the Oculus, so you'd have to hope they wouldn't make the same mistake twice.Elsewhere on the forums, Zarhym promises, comically, that we'll all enjoy this (and that we'll forget to post how much we enjoy it on the forums afterwards). He says that the fight is different from anything else we've done in the World of Warcraft, and that when all is said and blown up, it'll be an epic encounter. We'll see.Need more news about Ulduar? We've got updates, previews, speculation, and everything else you need to know about the next big raid coming in patch 3.1. If the Titans are hiding it up there, we'll tell you about it here.
