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How players are using cross-realm raiding to foster communities
With the introduction of cross-realm raiding in patch 4.3.2 and the Raid Finder, players have gone above and beyond in creating new and exciting server-less communities that bring in raiders from all over the world via Real ID grouping. While the Dragon Soul raid is not available currently for players using cross-realm raiding, all other raids and difficulties are, and there is no better time to go back to old content and finish off stuff during the wait until the next expansion. Sites like LFRaid.com and Twitterland Raiding are two communities that have sprung up quickly in this new cross-realm raiding world. Twitterland Raiding is a website created for the Twitter WoW community to form up groups for raiding across server lines. With a centralized place to express interest in raiding as well as no server structure or logistics to worry about besides Real ID names (which gets immensely easier with the introduction of BattleTags), raiding can happen in greater volume and more quickly.
The Queue: Superb Owl
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today. Why can't I find out anything about this Superb Owl? dinojake15 asked: Any word yet on MoP's system requirements? I got a little 10.5.8 MacBook that can just barely run Cataclysm. Just wondering if I should start saving money for a new computer now. Blizzard has been incrementally increasing WoW's system requirements with each expansion, so it's safe to assume that MoP will require even more muscle than Cataclysm did. I don't think it's been announced just how much more muscle, but if you had trouble running Cataclysm, you're going to have trouble with MoP.
The Queue: A giddy thing
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today. This Queue is excellent. *throws The Queue on the ground; it shatters into a million pieces* Another! Ellyon asked: My main is a resto druid. Lifebloom triggers Replenishment and I keep a stack of Lifebloom on a tank for, ideally, the whole fight. Last night I was in Raid Finder and noticed that Replenishment kept falling off. I would refresh Lifebloom just to make sure, but Replenishment didn't return until some other moment: a moment when I was not casting or refreshing Lifebloom. I'm wondering, is there a priority system that another character is the trigger for Replenishment? With my style of healing, Replenishment should be up the whole fight, but I regularly saw it fall off and was not refreshed at the moment I would have expected. Commenter metafarm answered this one really well, so here it is for posterity: It gives 10 party or raid members (with the lowest mana left) 1% of their maximum mana every 10 second for 15 seconds, or 1.5% over the full duration. Each time it is triggered, the 10 most needy members are recalculated, and those people either receive the buff, or have it refreshed on them.
The Queue: A sudden increase in prudishness
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today. "Finally," you're saying right now, "Sacco is back with more YouTube videos of songs he likes." Yer darn right! Puntable asked: I'm not sure I really want to ask this question, but here goes. Blizzard has been changing a lot of the armor models on females, such as black mageweave leggings, to cover more skin. Why the sudden increase in prudishness after 6 years? Well, Black Mageweave Leggings haven't changed since launch. What other instances of an "increase in prudishness" can you provide? If you need evidence that Blizzard hasn't stopped putting in revealing armor for women, check out rogue season 11 gear.
Ol' Grumpy and the specter of pointless elitism
Ol' Grumpy (that's me) has a bit of a problem. He's started tanking for pickup groups lately. I guess technically that means I have two problems, but doctors probably can prescribe some medication or something for white-hot eruptions of seething rage. I'm starting to think Neltharion was the tank for the dragon aspects' regular 5-man group. However, my molten cauldron of hate masquerading as a soul isn't what I came to talk to you about today. No, I'm actually here to explain what pointless elitism is and why it's actually bad. I'll use an example from a recent 5-man. I had signed up to tank because I wanted the goody bag of potent bribery. I admit it, I'm weak. I zoned into End Time, said hello to the mostly uncommunicative group, and started charging things, as I am wont to do. Things died, we progressed, no one pulled aggro by DoTing a mob while I was mounted and on the other side of the map -- it was pretty much ideal for a pickup. Then we got to Sylvanas, killed her, and as someone looted, two of the DPSers begin savaging the third for doing less than they. I look at Skada and saw that all three of them were floating between 11k and 14k DPS overall, with this one player sinking to 7k on Sylv. They were all geared about the same -- a couple of HoT pieces -- so clearly, they were all there because they needed the gear.
The Light and How to Swing It: The Fall of Deathwing, ret edition, part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! This is it, guys and girls. This is the moment we have all been training for while hitting that poor target dummy in Orgrimmar, because only repeatedly bashing a plank of wood will truly prepare you to square off against a dragon as epic as the big DW. So pick up your weapon, your bag of tricks, and your handful of cooldowns -- it's time to kill Deathwing the Destroyer. Spine of Deathwing I remember when there was wild speculation on what the Deathwing fight in Dragon Soul would actually look like. The devs announced that we would jump on him for part of the fight, and my strange brain secretly hoped that we would start at his tail and work our way up, maybe chopping off his legs and wings into a giant container of dry rub so the Titans could come on down and throw it on a massive barbecue. Honestly, we should have done that with Onyxia so she couldn't be resurrected 14 times!
Have reforging demands become too complex?
Have you ever cringed at the idea of picking up a new upgrade because you knew it meant you were going to have to reforge almost every single piece of gear you wear? Do you actually consider picking up more than one of the same item so that you can have it reforged differently for different specs? Do you ever want to punch that smarmy, overly reverbbed ethereal in the face after you dump several hundred gold reforging all your gear because there was no negotiation? (You just charged me a flat fee, you jerk!) That last one may just be me. Reforging gear has become a huge part of optimization. It is at least as important as gemming and enchanting. Sites like WoW Reforge and Ask Mr. Robot (to name just two) are heavily consulted by players looking to squeeze every last erg of performance out of their gear. Is it too much? Has the minigame of stat tetris gotten out of hand?
4 steps for dealing with Raid Finder harassment
I'm a reformed bully. A few years back, I was the kid in the PUG raid calling everyone else bad and acting like I was the Light's gift to raiding. I've since worked to distance myself from that attitude. While I still get annoyed from time to time when I see poor play in Raid Finder and generally have a sour taste in my mouth while pugging raids, I've become a lot more aware of how painful and harmful my words can be, and I keep them to myself. With my past experience being a bully, it made sense that when our editors wanted someone to write up a survival guide to using the Raid Finder, the most dreadful hive of scum and villianry since Mos Eisley, I would take the challenge on. The three main types of WoW bullies In my real life, I work with kids. I've spent the past third of my 24-year life working with kids. As a result, I've been exposed to a lot of bullies, both online and on the playground. There are a few staple things to remember about people who are also bullies, particularly when it comes to the Raid Finder. Here's who you'll find there. 1. The Covering for His Own Inadequacies Bully This is your archetypical bully cliché, but it's grounded in reality. These bullies are horrifically self-conscious, and they're just lashing out at whoever's handy because they're afraid that if they don't, they're going to be the one picked out and picked on. We've all been here; it's called high school (also Congress, but I repeat myself). These bullies are fairly common in your average Raid Finder run. Just yesterday, I ran a RF with Shelam, my blood death knight. Now, Shelam has an average ilevel of 378 and has tanked all of RF before, but he was called out and almost vote-kicked by three players: another blood DK who was trying to tank while dual-wielding Souldrinkers (a big no-no), his friend and guildmate the last-on-meters fire mage, and an unholy death knight who was fully gemmed for stamina despite being a DPS class. They all called me out for being undergeared, most likely because I was the easiest target in the raid due to my lone remaining blue item, an ilevel 346 helm. Had they not gone after me, it would have been easy for them to have been the recipients of some harsh (if accurate) words, so they chose to go on the attack instead. That let them redirect the blame and their insecurity onto me while feeling empowered because they were making accusations instead of fielding them.
The Queue: Catnap
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today. It's almost the end of a very long weekend. Who wants to take a nap? It's me. I do. Tfish asked: What's the deal with that new Lor'themar story? I mean I guess it's kind of cool that we get some new lore on him considering he has just been sitting around doing nothing for the longest time, but I really don't care about what he was doing in the time span between BC, and the launch of WOTLK now that we're almost 3 expansions away from that time period. A valid question. I'd agree that it does feel a little odd for blood elves to be the only race that didn't get a "new" story, but In the Shadow of the Sun is important for a different reason -- Blizzard just made a writing contest entry canon. It's very rare for something like that to happen in the industry. Sarah deserves a lot of credit for writing a story so good and so in-universe that Blizzard decided it should be part of WoW canon. As for Lor'themar, well, who knows? Velen got just the smallest amount of presence in Cataclysm; maybe MoP will hold some new developments for Lor'themar.
Official patch notes for patch 4.3.2
Patch 4.3.2 is at hand, and you can find the full list of patch notes after the cut. If you haven't been keeping track, this is not a content patch; it just updates some features, fixes some bugs, and adds the new 64-bit client (finally). Also of note: Players can no longer receive two of the same item at the same time when winning loot from a Raid Finder boss, Vengeance no longer acts off player damage, and Aspect of the Hawk got a big ol' buff. Update: The patch will not be releasing today after all, barring some sort of miracle. Remember, if Blizzard hasn't said it, it isn't guaranteed. Sorry! But heck, why don't you brush up on your patch notes anyway?
The aesthetic consequences of new character models
This is neither a post excoriating nor exulting but rather simply contemplating the process of updating character models in World of Warcraft. I got to thinking about this when I realized that I'm always happiest when I get Well of Eternity because I like the night elf model. Tall, spare, muscular, it looks excellent in plate. There are certainly flaws to the model, but they're concealed entirely by my gear. Night elf males have large hands, but those hands look just fine curled around a weapon, and the faces are entirely concealed behind my helmet. As you can see above, the night elf male does an excellent job of showing off the textures and details of my armor set, especially the plated legs. Redesigning these models will have a variety of effects. As a long-time player, I have my own stylistic loves and hates. Human females look astonishingly vapid and nigh-idiotic, and their animations in melee look ludicrous to the point that I expect them to fall over every weapon swing, while gnomes and blood elves have excellent combat flow. Female undead melee are awesome to watch, but I can't stand the bones poking through my gear. That's part of the complication here. The models you love, someone else hates, and the models you hate, someone else loves. That's often viewed as a cop-out -- but man, if you screw up my tauren, I will burn your world. (Note: Will not actually burn your world ... too lazy.)
The Queue: Do it live
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today. Warpaint is a band you just have to see live. This is a fantastic live version of Burgundy followed by Undertow. Zaet asked: Do u think there will ever be another Warcraft RTS? Put plainly, I'd be incredibly surprised if we saw another entry into the main Warcraft series while WoW was running. Placing Warcraft 4 right after WoW gives Blizzard very little wiggle room when it comes to the MMO's story, but placing it long after WoW sort of invalidates the MMO's story progress altogether. Essentially: "Here's what's going to happen regardless of how WoW's story plays out." Of course, I'd love to play as an older Arator the Redeemer or even a King Anduin Wrynn, mind you.
Totem Talk: The ups and downs of playing enhancement in Dragon Soul
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.) I've said in the past that enhancement is in a good place in 4.3, and that's the truth. Despite some really awful itemization and some as-yet-unresolved issues with the spec, enhancement is remaining a strong middle-of-the-pack contender. In non-cutting-edge raid groups that don't have multiple Dragonwrath-wielding casters, we're even better. Dragon Soul is a great instance for enhancement in 4.3 because it offers a variety of fights. Some play to enhancement's strengths, some highlight its weaknesses, and some fights are Ultraxion and your DPS spec doesn't matter, provided you can push buttons and click a shiny purple dot on his screen every 45 seconds. For the purpose of brevity, I'm going to assume you're familiar with the normal-mode mechanics of these fights (and if you're not, some are conveniently covered by my frenemy Tyler Caraway in the Ready Check column) and just speak to how enhancement specifically fares on these fights. Chopping Morchok There's nothing particularly special about Morchok for enhancement, except if you're doing the fight on heroic. Shamanistic Rage and Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem make Morchok's Stomp damage negligible, but Stomps don't really hit hard enough on normal to worry about. However, if you have a healer in line of sight during a black phase (and you've done nothing in recent memory that would cause them to hate you), Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem and Shamanistic Rage will let you stay on the boss for most if not all of the phase. If you don't have a friendly healer, enhancement still fares better than most melee on this fight, as cast Lava Bursts and Lightning Bolts still hit hard.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Unleashing fury in the Dragon Soul
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. I love fury. I raided in vanilla WoW with a two-handed fury DPS spec and also tanked, because everyone who played a warrior tanked back then. I tanked with a fury spec that worked very well for threat generation, but I eventually switched to an arms/prot spec for the Mortal Strike debuff. When Titan's Grip was announced for Wrath of the Lich King, everyone who knew me knew what my reaction would be. TG fury became my DPS spec of choice until I became a main tank for my Wrath guild, and it has stayed my favorite spec throughout the talent's existence. Even now that I raid as arms DPS, fury is technically my main spec and arms my secondary. I even applauded when Single-Minded Fury was announced for Cata because I knew a lot of fury warriors missed the one-handed weapon playstyle.
The Queue: Gee wiz
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today. I'm on the fence about some of the Diablo III system changes announced yesterday, but at least half of 'em are pretty good changes, so I'm definitely continuing to look forward to playing my wizard (best class) when the game comes out some time this year. Erik asked: What do you feel the odds are that Blizzard will still add the older tier content to Raid Finder? Have them on Normal modes, after the nerfs it should be possible for 25 random people to handle these days. I ask because if there really is no more content patches left, that is a long time to go until Mists. Couldn't say. Blizzard devs have expressed a desire to hook up the Raid Finder to older raids, but with cross-realm raiding, you don't really need the Raid Finder at all for really old raids. For stuff like Firelands or BoT or BWD, I'd imagine there are some issues with figuring out how many people you'd need for a "full" group -- 25 is probably overkill with BoT and BWD when everyone's in 378+ gear from 4.3. And would they need to have a Raid Finder difficulty mode as well? Would you just play them on normal mode? That would defeat the Raid Finder's purpose as raiding with training wheels on. If it did have a Raid Finder mode, what item level gear would drop? 346 would make the raids even more pointless than they already are; leaving them at 359 would mean no difference from the loot that already drops in normal mode. Lots of considerations; no easy answers. As much as I want people to see previous tiers of raiding, I'm just not sure it's worth development time that could be spent giving us Pandaria, which will ship with all its raids hooked up to the Raid Finder.
Ol' Grumpy and the Dragon Soul nerf
OK, I've had a day to think about the recent announcements regarding the Dragon Soul raid and the progressive nerfs that will be rolling out at the end of January. My thoughts on it have evolved from my initial confusion and even disbelief. I freely admit, when I first read that Blizzard was introducing an ICC-modeled debuff to the raid, I was incredulous. I didn't see why it was necessary, and I said as much. Several of you then upbraided me on Twitter, and frankly, you gave me things to think about that I hadn't considered. This dovetailed with recent statistics posted on MMO-Champion about who'd completed Dragon Soul in the Raid Finder vs. normal mode. This led me, inexorably, to the following conclusions: The Raid Finder is head and shoulders above normal mode raiding in terms of popularity. 35% of level 85 players have completed Raid Finder vs. 4% completing normal mode; that's a huge, huge shift. Keep in mind that Blizzard has more exacting statistics available internally, but this serves as an indicator of a trend. Fewer than 200,000 players have finished normal mode Dragon Soul. I'll admit, I found this shocking. With the exception of Ultraxion and Madness, I found Dragon Soul to be undertuned and figured many more players would have completed the raid than this. One commenter on Twitter even blasted me for my elitism, when I had been under the impression I'm a fairly middle-of-the-road raider. These numbers bear that out. Over 1 million players have finished Dragon Soul in the Raid Finder. Both this statistic and the preceding one are as of the end of December 2011. But how ever they've changed and how ever the more precise Blizzard statistics play out, this is still a very strong indicator that normal mode Dragon Soul isn't the cakewalk some of us thought it was, myself included to some extent. Almost 800,000 players finished normal Firelands, and the majority of them did so after the nerf to Firelands. I think this fairly well speaks for itself.
The Light and How to Swing It: The Fall of Deathwing, ret edition part 1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! Well, here we are, the first two of the final four bosses of the expansion. That is, we think Deathwing is the final boss of the expansion -- it is still unclear whether Blizzard will pull another We're not done with the next expansion yet! raid on us like it did in Wrath with Ruby Sanctum. Regardless, we have a raid that needs a conclusion and a guide to go along with it, so let's get started! Please note that this guide, like many others I have written, is for the normal version of each encounter. Some mechanics, like Fading Light and Twilight Sappers, either work differently or have been removed on the Raid Finder difficulty. Ultraxion I really wish I had more to say about this fight, but Blizzard isn't having it. Simply put, Ultraxion is this raid's Patchwerk with the addition of a button. Yes, you really do just stand in one place, run your rotation train on him, and hit a button when the situation calls for it. I honestly wish there were more to this fight, but there it is.
Patch 4.3 is the last of Cataclysm, Dave Kosak confirms
Dave "Fargo" Kosak, lead quest designer for World of Warcraft, recently confirmed in an interview with Videogamer.com that the recent content patch 4.3 will be the final content patch of Cataclysm. We will not be getting a Sunwell- or Halion-esque final patch before Mists of Pandaria. However, this does not discount the patches and updates that will most likely be coming to add Mists content or prepare for the next expansion's in-game launch events. While the confirmation that there will be no more content patches for Cataclysm was definitely the big news of the interview, some other nice tidbits are buried within. Kosak confirms that the Raid Finder is something players are really taking to, and he discusses the community's response to transmogrification and the number of ancillary sites have popped up because of it. Also of note is Kosak's response about subscription numbers. After reading his sincere "we don't obsessively track subscriptions" sentiment, I couldn't help but remember that in the back of my head, no matter what goes on with the numbers, what works, and what doesn't, these guys are real people who believe in this game. You can read the whole interview on videogamer.com. 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!
Breakfast Topic: Thank everything for transmogrification
If not for transmogrification, my worgen would look like he escaped from the bargain bin at a dirt mall. Now, my worgen is an alt and one I can't spend the time with to gear up like my main, so in the past, I was simply used to having a mismatched set of gear. Some of it looked cool, but even when I was in full epics, the pieces often didn't match like when I had two pieces of tier 10, two pieces of DK look-alike gear and the rest from various 5-mans. Now, thanks to transmog, I always look how I want. I cycle between three or so sets on this guy (tier 2, BC-era PvP gear, and tier 10) and am perfectly happy with them. Others use transmog more proactively than I do to create a specific look. I just use it so I have a unified look. I absolutely love my complete BWL set look; it makes me so happy. If you know me as Ol' Grumpy, writer of bitter, trenchant cynicism and curmudgeonly scowls, you may not be aware that I can feel happiness. I was surprised too! So how about you? Are you making use of transmog? Do you use it to design unique looks, or are you like me, just happy to finally not have to wear mismatched pieces of gear? World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.
The Queue: Gangsta
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today. I can't guarantee you'll like this song, but I'm embedding it anyway because, by golly, I have a platform with which to provide people with weird-ass music. Adam asked: Do you think we'll see another raid after the big bad boss raid this expansion as we have with others (Sunwell after Black Temple, Ruby Sanctum after Icecrown Citadel)? Blizzard reps did say that this was the last major content patch before MoP, but I think the wording on those statements has been altered slowly since the patch was originally previewed, so we honestly have no idea at this point. I hope we don't, but only inasmuch as it would mean Pandaria would be here sooner.
