icecrown-5-man
Latest
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 ...
The Queue: Allie gets lost in Icecrown edition
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Allison Robert will be your host today. Alex is popping out for a RL issue, so I'm afraid, dear readers, that you're going to get stuck with the writer who will spend the entirety of a question today wandering off the Icecrown map. HC SVNT DRACONES. Frostwyrms, anyway. As a warning, the answer to said question contains what some players will consider a spoiler, so don't read past the cut if you don't want to know anything about an upcoming Icecrown encounter. TAD asks... Will experience acceleration go away once Cataclysm drops? We don't think so, because the 1-85 grind for a new character will still be pretty lengthy even with experience acceleration, but truthfully we don't know. I'd argue that Blizzard doesn't have much of a reason to change current leveling speed, because it's only efficient if the character in question is outfitted in heirloom items (particularly the chest and shoulders with the +experience boost). This obviously won't happen for a genuinely new player seeing the content for the first time. As you've probably also observed with alts on a different realm from your main, leveling's not that fast without being bankrolled by another toon or sitting on a pile of heirlooms. Then again, I'm one of those crazy people who enjoys questing for its own sake and I'll be doing all the new quests anyway, so what do I know?
Officers' Quarters: Patch 3.3 -- An officer's perspective
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. Much as I've done with Patch 3.2 and other major patches in the past, I'd like to examine what 3.3 will mean for officers. All major patches require some forethought and adjustment, and this one just happens to be a doozy! Icecrown Citadel The ultimate raid of this expansion, Icecrown Citadel is poised to be one of the most exciting raids that Blizzard has ever released. As such, I can virtually guarantee you'll have long-lost players coming out of the woodwork to get back into the raiding scene for a chance to face off with the Lich King. Make sure you review your guild's policies for inviting players to raids to make sure that slots will be awarded in a way that's as fair as possible while still giving your raid a solid chance at success. One debate that's sure to rage among officers and raid leaders this time around is whether to extend lockouts until you beat the zone and unlock the hard mode toggle or to reset the instance each week to farm the early bosses. I'm still not sure how my guild is going to handle this. It will certainly depend on how quickly we can clear those first bosses and which bosses present more of a roadblock. If we're clearing quickly, we'll probably keep going until we hit a boss we can't beat. Then we'll reset and farm up more loot and Frost Badges.
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.
Breakfast Topic: What do you want to see in Icecrown Citadel?
While a lot of us (myself included) have been starving for Cataclysm news lately, it would behoove us to remember that we still have one more patch to go: Patch 3.3, the (hopefully) epic showdown with one of the most iconic figures in Warcraft lore, the Lich King himself. We've actually learned very little about it so far. We got Ghostcrawler admitting there's not 31 bosses, and a few other BlizzCon tidbits, but beyond that, what do we know?The other day, Zarhym at least gave us a small hint or two, saying that the 5-man dungeons would be epic and essential to the overall fight against Arthas, that they would be separate content from the raids, and that neither dungeons nor raids (Thank Elune) would have vehicular or mounted combat (the airship battle will not be a vehicle fight, it seems). Of course, that does give us hope, but doesn't get us to the meat of the dungeon so to speak. So I'm sort of wondering: What do you want or expect to see in Icecrown Citadel, both the raids and the dungeons? Are there certain bosses or boss encounters you want to see? What type of storylines would you think epic enough for the 5 mans? I'm still hoping for the completely ignoble, futile death of Tirion Fordring, but that could just be me.
