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Arcane Brilliance: Level 80 mage gearing road map, part 2
The dawning of another Saturday brings with it another edition of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column delivered direct to your driveway by a paperboy who blinks from house to house, fending off overprotective guard dogs with the occasional conjured ball of flame and constantly demanding his two dollars (I really, really wish I could have found an actual clip of that, but yet again, YouTube has failed me). It's all pretty impressive, especially when you consider that this paperboy is also wearing a dress. Okay, after last week's part one of this topic, many of you disagreed with my assertion that a fresh level 80 mage should attempt to upgrade his gear prior to jumping into random heroics. I understand this point of view. Farming random heroics is by far the fastest way to gear up initially, and it is true that if you find the right groups, you and your pathetic new-80 DPS may be viewed less as a liability and more of a charity project. Thinking about it, I too secretly enjoy having someone in the group who's needing on blue drops because they're honest upgrades for him. As long as we have a decently geared tank (or a healer who's capable of keeping him up even if he isn't), even a dungeon run with terrible damage dealers can go relatively smoothly. If you wish to gear up as rapidly as possible and you don't mind the idea that you won't quite be pulling your own weight at first, then by all means, skip my first few suggestions for gearing up and head directly for the random heroics. Better yet, get together with some better-geared guildies and queue together. That way you'll always be in a good group and one that doesn't absolutely require you to be up-to-par right away. This week, regardless of the path you've taken to get there, I'm going to assume that you've been industrious and spent a significant amount of time gearing through drops and collecting emblems in those random heroics. Here's the general road you should be following ...
Shifting Perspectives: How to be a good PUG druid
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, everyone discovers (as I have been saying for years, but who listens to the bear tank with an ass the size of Cincinnati? No one, that's who) that PUG's are not so bad. Moore returns with a ukulele. I'm going to pull out one of the big guns on the folk scene in the Americas -- Richard Shindell. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a high-quality version of this song available anywhere online, and I highly recommend listening to the versions off Shindell's Sparrow's Point or (more especially) the live album Courier. Yes, it starts off slow, but give it a chance. On A Sea of Fleur-de-Lis is a very odd, albeit poetic, song with esoteric lyrics, although they make a little more sense once you know they were written while Shindell was considering leaving Union Theological Seminary. Otherwise, as with many of Shindell's pieces, BYO subtext. Beat that, Moore. Anyway, after reading Archmage Pants' article on the new LFG system for mages and Daniel Whitcomb's guide on the same for death knights, I decided it wasn't fair letting a bunch of smelly DPS have all the fun. "But some death knights tank," you object. That's just a widely-disseminated myth, as all those of us on the Retaliation battlegroup know. You have tried the new LFG, right? Allow me to be the Virgil to your Dante in this new, more lucrative version of hell. Concerning tanks, by the way --
Ready Check: Icecrown Citadel introduction quests
It's not technically an attunement, but there is a series of quests that guide you through the introductory 5 Player Dungeons surrounding Icecrown Citadel. You don't have to do these dungeons to get into the normal versions of Icecrown, but it sure brings a lot to the experience. I guess, in a sense, you can think of it as a simplified attunement. Additionally, the gear that drops from these first three instances will go a long way towards catching up people to the ICC raid. In my raid, we call this "bootstrapping." There's a bunch of reasons you might need to bootstrap folks: a tank rotation, new people, meteor crashing into the planet, what have you. As you do the quest, you'll enter (and do battle in): The Forge of Souls The Pit of Saron, and The Halls of Reflection So, let's take a look at these three instances and how to blur through them.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Pit of Saron first impressions
Welcome to WoW.com's two part piece on our first impressions of the Pit of Saron, one of the three new 5-man dungeons in the upcoming Patch 3.3. First up is Matthew Rossi from the point of view of a tank, followed by Matt Low with a healer's take.Okay, first off we're going to try and keep all spoilers after the cut. If you're interested in them, you go ahead and look, but please be warned. Today, your intrepid WoW.com team assembled in the super justice fortress and set forth to brave the Pit of Saron, the currently accessible dungeon on the PTR.We were a stalwart group consisting of myself, Alex Ziebart, Matt Low and Tristan from The Elitists podcast. Since there was a bug where some non-premade characters were unable to see the instance due to phasing issues, we played premades (except for Tristan, but his gear was at about that level as well): Myself as a gnome warrior tanking, Matt on a human priest and Alex on a dwarf ret paladin. While my human's DPS gear is about as good as the premade, my tanking set has more T8 in it, so the gnome felt even more OP than usual for a level 80 instance. We did bosses on both normal and heroic and the general consensus is, heroic seemed undertuned or perhaps not even tuned yet at all. We saw no major differences between our normal and heroic fights.As was mentioned in the official Blizzard page about the Pit of Saron and Patch 3.3, there are two bosses before you can access the final challenge of the instance. Since we were an Alliance group, we had Jaina Proudmoore helping us (sort of) along the way.
