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World of Warcraft's 5.4 trailer features Orc on Panda violence, boats
It's been a long road for the Alliance and Horde, the perennially at-war factions that fuel much of World of Warcraft's lore (and PvP). Over the last few years, players waved the Alliance or Horde banner as they conquered old gods, dispatched massive dragons, toppled titans, and even crushed a walking constellation. But perhaps none of those battles will compare to the final showdown with the power-thirsty madmanorc Garrosh Hellscream, who seems to have angered pretty much everyone on both sides of the fence with his latest plans for world domination. Mists of Pandaria's patch 5.4, titled Siege of Ogrimmar, is almost here. With it comes new content, flexible raiding, a solo pet battle scenario, proving grounds, and one more raid to clear featuring the final showdown between Hellscream and those who would challenge him. Blizzard marked the approaching cataclysm (get it!?) with an all-new trailer, which you can watch after the break.
Flexible Raids come to World of Warcraft with patch 5.4
In the olden days of World of Warcraft, it took 40 dedicated people to down some of the game's toughest content. It wasn't easy to keep a guild stocked with the necessary number of people to make these raids possible, and Blizzard reduced raid sizes to 10- and 25-man encounters starting with the Burning Crusade expansion in the hopes of making raiding more accessible for smaller guilds and raid leaders working with busy real-life humans. It is with this same accessibility in mind that Blizzard has just announced Flexible Raids, a new form of raid content that will debut with the game's upcoming 5.4 patch. In the simplest terms, these raids automatically adjust their difficulty based on how many players are present, supporting any number between 10 and 25. The difficulty resets week-to-week; if 22 people come one week and 13 the next, the new raiders won't be locked into last week's numbers. A new tier of item that falls between the Raid Finder and Normal difficulties is being introduced for Flexible Raiders, and Flexible Raid lockouts will be separate from those of Normal and Heroic attempts. Blizzard has also promised additional rewards for those who participate in Flexible, Normal, and Heroic raids -- rewards that will be unavailable to Raid Finder groups. Flexible Raiding will be made available piece by piece as Blizzard tweaks the formula. It should be launching on the test realm Soon™.
We Have a Tabard: It's not cheating if...
Looking for a guild? Well, you can join ours! We have a tabard and everything! Check back for Amanda Dean talking about guilds and guild leadership in We Have a Tabard.As I've mentioned before I'm not totally against PUGging raids. I find its actually an excellent way to get to know people on the server and sometimes a handy recruiting tool. Depending on your guild rules, there are some raids to PUG and some raids to save your lockout for your guild.I had a guildie today all distraught because he was saved to Naxx 10 helping a guildie out. He apologized profusely when someone was putting together a "Badge Run Blitz" but couldn't heal it. At this point Naxx 10 is like running an extended heroic with more gold and shards. We've progressed beyond it, so lockouts are fair game.I get a wee bit crabbier when folks get locked out of our current progression. We're actually still working on Ulduar 10, and need to draw upon any available resources to move forward. Guildies can feel free to run Naxx, Vault, and Obsidian Sanctum to their heart's content. Usually when someone asks for my blessing to run with another group, I give it if they have to miss guild times or we're unable to get into the group.
Patch 3.2: Raid lockouts extendable
Man, what a crazy news day this has been, and the day's not even over yet. Blizzard just rolled out a new PTR build, so we took a quick trip to the Patch 3.2 PTR and discovered a whole new mechanic that Blizzard hasn't mentioned yet. It's yet another change to how raiding works, and it's pretty cool. We killed Venoxis in Zul'Gurub and, upon being saved to the instance, noticed that we now had the option to extend our raid lockout -- that is, to make it last twice as long or until the next week's lockout would end. This means that, if your casual guild is a scrappy bunch working on Ulduar, but you can only get to Mimiron each week before the lockout expires, you can extend your current lockout into the following week to get more practice on the bosses you don't get to see as often.Now -- ostensibly -- once you've done what you need to do with your lockout, you can actually remove the raid lockout extension and use your current week's lockout too. We haven't gotten to try it yet, but it looks like the functionality is there. Pretty cool!We'll wait to see what Blizzard has to say about it, but this is great news for smaller or more casual guilds who really want to clear instances and don't mind less loot per week.More shots of the functionality after the jump.
