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WoW Insider Show live this afternoon on Ustream
Our podcast is back yet again this afternoon, and it's sure to be a good one. Turpster and I will welcome our bloggers Lesley Smith and Robin Torres on to talk about the biggest news in WoW from the last week: we'll touch on the new Druid forms and what we all think of those, 3.1.3 and how it's worked out so far, players with amazing achievements in game (like the level 1-80 no deaths guy, and Ensidia's big finish), and scams you might want to look out for ingame. And if we have time, we'll talk about one of the stranger stories to come out of the WoW community lately. The show begins over on the our Ustream page at June 6, 2009 3:30 PM EDT var date_span = document.getElementById("date"); var date = new Date(date_span.innerHTML); var monthname=new Array("Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug", "Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"); var weekday=new Array("Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday", "Friday","Saturday"); var year = date.getFullYear(); var day_of_month = date.getDate(); var month = monthname[date.getMonth()]; var day = weekday[date.getDay()]; var hour = date.getHours(); if (hour > 11) { if (hour > 12) {hour -= 12} am_pm = "PM"; } else { am_pm = "AM"; } var minute = date.getMinutes(); if (minute < 10) { minute = "0"+minute; } date_string = day + ", " + month + " " + day_of_month; date_string += " at " + hour + ":" + minute + " " + am_pm; offset = -date.getTimezoneOffset()/60; if (offset >= 0) { offset = "+"+offset; } date_string += " in your time zone (GMT"+offset+")"; date_span.innerHTML = (date_string); , or you can jump after the break to see an embedded feed. We'll also answer your email, which you can send to us at theshow@wow.com, and as usual we'll be chatting live both during and after the show. Should be a lot of fun -- we'll see you this afternoon!
Ensidia gets world first 25-man Algalon kill
Just seven weeks after patch 3.1 brought Ulduar to the live servers, Ensidia has conquered it. They just made the world-first kill of the 25-man version of Algalon, the optional final boss that appears only after completing every other boss's hard mode. Algalon only allows one hour per raid lockout period of attempts on him. Ensidia got the world-first kill of 10-man Algalon a bit over two weeks ago. They say the 25-man version is "not an easy fight," "highly gear dependent," and "a significant difficulty increase over the 10 man version." Apparently last week they got him to 4%, only 1% over the threshold to beat him (he gives up, like Mal'Ganis in Culling of Stratholme). That must be frustrating as heck. Well, congratulations to Ensidia, once again! I wonder what they'll be doing until patch 3.2 comes out.
[1.Local]: Making ourselves at home
Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.Welcome home to WoW.com. Moving into a new place can be hectic, but we think our new digs at WoW.com are pretty darn comfy. In addition to a fresh face and identity for WoW Insider, we've introduced the beta launch of WoW.com Profiles. Show off your characters with a profile on WoW.com. By downloading the WoW.com addon, you can also keep all of your friends up to date on what you're doing in game, and make blog posts and upload screenshots directly from your game client. Not a big fan of the social media scene? You don't have to change a thing – WoW.com offers all the old content you know (and hopefully love) so well. "If I'm being honest, when I first saw that the site had changed, I didn't really 'feel it,'" commented reader Retropally. "After days of it sinking in, I'm loving it. The new theme is awesome -- and really, nothing has changed in the way of the posts that are written ..."Join the [1.Local] gang and add your thoughts about our new look and social features -- and hop on across the fold to see what else readers were chatting about during the past week.
Ensidia gets 10-man Algalon world-first
Ensidia, the European super-guild that resulted from the merger of SK-Gaming and Nihilum last year, has just made the world first kill of the 10-man version of Algalon, Ulduar's true final boss. Algalon is only accessible after completing every other hard mode in Ulduar, and guilds are only given 60 minutes per week of attempts on him. 25-man Algalon has not yet been killed. For details on the loot, see Ensidia's announcement; there's some great stuff there. Mek, from Ensidia, had this to say about the fight: "It's a pretty intense fight but not quite as hard as Blizzard made it out to be. The 1 hour timer is the real challenge since you must do a perfect attempt within it." Of course, I think "not quite as hard" for Ensidia is probably a pretty good challenge for the rest of us mortals. Congratulations, Ensidia! [via MMO-Champion]
Ensidia snag world-first Rusted Proto Drake
Yesterday Ensidia completed the 10-man achievement Glory of the Ulduar Raider, giving them the first Rusted Proto-Drakes in the world. The 25-man version has yet to be cleared by anybody; the Ensidia member who posted the news mentions that he feels the 10-man achievements are significantly easier than the 25-man ones, though I'm not sure if this would still be the case if they were doing 10s in 10-man gear. In other news, the Rusted Proto-Drake (second mount shown in the video above) is one of the coolest-looking mounts I've seen in WoW, though in my opinion the best mount in Wrath so far is the Mimiron head.
Ensidia downs Yogg-Saron
It was inevitable that someone would down Yogg-Saron pretty quickly, and less than twenty four hours after the patch went live European guild Ensidia have claimed World First on the Death God. Given the non-linear progression into Ulduar, a lot of other guilds were able to pull off world firsts on other bosses. It also seems that Ensidia was focusing on clearing Ulduar in normal mode, as none of their kills were done on hard mode. This means we're unlikely to see Algalon downed this week (not by Ensidia, anyway). While it came as no surprise that someone killed him, what surprised me was that it was Ensidia. I was betting on Vodka (can I get a 'for the Alliance!' from anyone?) and that they managed to do it while many of the EU realms were having stability issues. Of course, it should be noted that Ensidia was the same guild that cleared all Wrath content three days after its release (they hadn't decided on a name yet).Boubouille over at MMO Champion has a full raid list and info on some of the loot that dropped, including a rather nice cloak and a piece of that legendary healer mace.
15 Minutes of Fame: Teza of wowraid.com
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.Some of the most fascinating and insightful interesting profiles here on 15 Minutes of Fame have been about players you've never heard of before: an anthropologist whose field research is inside the raiding World of Warcraft, or the couple who assembled a scale model of Booty Bay entirely out of Legos. But we suspect that most regular WI readers will have heard at least in passing of Teza, the bleeding-edge guilds he has played with and the widely read WoW resource sites he's helped create. Teza's latest success: wowraid.com, launched in March to offer up-to-the-minute news and PvE raiding resources. Teza's WoW pedigree is a long one. The old-school raider was a founder of Curse guild, which has split, merged and morphed its way through incarnations including SK-Gaming and now Ensidia. Today, Teza plays with still another well known raiding guild, Apex. Teza created Curse's add-ons section as a guild resource, guiding its explosive evolution into a widely used public add-ons resource. He also built WorldofRaids.com to offer hardcore raiding news and what become a leading PvE progression tracker. After helping WorldofRaids' transition to become a Curse site in 2007, Teza has created a new WoW news site, wowraid.com. In a strange melange of English, French and Franglais/raidspeak, we visited with Teza about raiding in today's World of Warcraft, keeping up with WoW news, raiding progression and more.
The Queue: Ulduar progression and more
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Ah, maintenance day. The day where I finally get to go out into the world and suck some sunshine into my pallid flesh. I may even pick up some groceries! One can only order crates of Ramen off of the internet so many times before life starts to get a little bland. ...Wait, but if I leave the house... who will write The Queue!? Oh man, forget it, I'll get some sunlight next year. Maybe I can order some Pringles to add a little flavor to my noodles.Fargostar5000 asked... Don't know if anyone has asked this yet, but are groups going able to run Ulduar-1o successfully using only the gear from tbe other 10-mans thus far, or will heroic level raid gear be necessary/recommended?
The Queue: I like fire
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Yesterday we had a question about the little fiery looking thumbnail I use at the end of almost every edition of The Queue. What the heck is it? Well, it's pretty hard to make out the details as a little thumbnail, but it's a picture of Volkhan from Halls of Lightning. The big red flare is a fireburst that comes up when he wangs his anvil with his hammer. I thought the bigger version looked pretty cool, so I kept using the thumbnail.alpha5099 asked... I keep seeing references to EU-Magtheridon, and I'm absolutely fascinated by a server with such a ridiculously unbalanced player ratio. Does anyone know how that happened? Is there some reason an insane number of Horde players are there? Did the Horde just start getting the edge and the Alliance players left for less ganky pastures, and it's gone out of control since then?
Free realm transfers available for select EU realms
Earlier today, Thundgot of the offiical EU forums announced a couple of free character migrations for EU PvP realms. The transfers are an attempt to move some players from a few overly populated PvP realms to some that could use a little help. These transfers are available from December 17th (yesterday) to December 23rd. The open transfers are:From: Burning Legion, Drak'thul, Sylvanas To: Ahn'Qiraj, Burning Blade, XaviusFrom: Magtheridon (Horde only)To: Haomarush, Zenedar
Why "easy raids" are a good thing (for now)
I really didn't expect to be writing this. Like others, I was left a bit nonplussed at the seeming ease of early raiding content in Wrath, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an interesting intersection of prudence, circumstances, and quite possibly some residual discomfort on Blizzard's part over how awful early BC raiding was. I don't think that the current "ease" of first-tier raid content in Wrath is a bad thing -- and I also don't expect future content to stay that way. My guild cleared all of the 25-man raid content in Wrath within two weeks of the expansion's release. Naxxramas was easily the biggest non-surprise. Doing Naxx-25 in the company of people who know the place inside and out is a pretty straightforward and -- dare I say it -- easy process. This is even more true with players who learned the original Naxx at 70, with a much greater margin for error than they would have had at 60. Honestly? Most of the fights haven't changed to the point where you'd have to toss out your previous strategy and start all over again. A raid that saw Naxx at any point between 60 and 70 is effectively an old dog that doesn't have to learn a new trick.
Behind the Curtain: Are we having fun?
Well, it all kicked off over on WoW Insider the other day, didn't it? You couldn't move for all the handbags being thrown around in the comments! Who'd have thunk it? Don't worry, I kid because I care. The thrust of the argument SLASH discussion was whether or not we should be tracking raid progression any more. It got me thinking. Not about raid progression exactly; about how different people approach MMOs and the content they offer; about how different people find 'fun' in different playstyles. Here at Behind the Curtain, I've shared my opinions on the Hardcore vs. Casual issue previously. To recap, I'm of the opinion that the difference between the two states, if it even exists, is in the goals one sets for oneself. Taking that line of thinking further, I began to think about fun. 'Fun' is a nebulous concept, difficult to pin down and pretty damned different for almost everyone in the world. Wikipedia currently defines fun as, "the expenditure of time in a manner designed for therapeutic refreshment of one's body or mind" which seems like a bit of a mouthful, to be honest.
TwentyFifthNovember becomes Ensidia
The merger between Nihilum and SK Gaming that was temporarily known as TwentyFifthNovember (who has already cleared all current Wrath content) has announced their new name. Ensidia. There are some neat details they've announced with their name, such as launching a community site soon and all of that, but none of that is particularly important.What's important is their new name sounds like some kind of medicine or drug. Every corner of the internet is currently giggling to themselves over it. A professional gaming group? No way. They're some kind of sleep aid, or erectile dysfunction medication. I've seen at least a dozen people rattling off potential side effects of taking Ensidia tonight. I'm not really curious about their raid progression anymore, I'm more interested in whether I can take it on an empty stomach or not.
