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'Final Fantasy XV' is actually a cookbook
Food is plays a central role in Final Fantasy XV -- and it's not just obvious Cup Noodle product placement, either. Meals add to your vitality and strength, increase magical resistances and even offer the chance of more experience points to grow your team. They're integral to your near-daily camp-outs, when you recover from battles and thumb through all the photos your bros took. Each dish has different benefits, and there are a lot of ways to learn new meals, from eating your way around the restaurants of the world of Eos to buying cookbooks and even just being "inspired" by poetry and random ingredients (often monster body parts) you pick up along the way. FFXV also attempts to offer some sort of regional differentiation in cuisine as you road-trip across states and towns. Some dishes are more elaborate twists on meals you've already eaten, but they're nonetheless different, with different local fish or delicacies. But is it actually possible to cook such varied cuisine, from rice balls to delicate sweet pastries, on (Coleman-sponsored!) cooking equipment? I took my high-school home-economics skills to my kitchen to see how I stacked up against Ignis, the game's designated cook. He's a glasses-wearing, English-accented, car-driving butler type. And now, my eternal rival.
Guildwatch: Just don't say "priceless"
We got quite a few good photoshopped victory pictures in the email after our suggestion that you send us some a few weeks ago, so you'll probably see a few of them here in the column over the next few weeks (assuming, that is, we don't get any hilarious chat logs that we need to show you). This one's from Tyranis, GM of The Arcane Council on Bloodhoof, who adds in some fun stuff to every screenshot his guild puts together. Go see more of them on their website.More downed news, as well as drama and recruiting notices, in this week's Guildwatch, which starts below. If you have news to send in, please do: drop us a quick note (the more you can emulate the format of the news below, the better) at guildwatch@wow.com. Meanwhile, read on for this week's column.
Breakfast topic: Are manually extended raid lockouts a good thing?
Hands up who remembers running Karazhan back in the days when it took a week to clear and you needed every one of those nights to do it? Are you currently spending your evenings raiding in Ulduar? Is Ignis taking more time to down than you anticipated? I think we've all been there, you're in the zone but just can't kill that pesky raid boss before the raid timer goes ding and everything resets. I've once did an early morning raid (we're talking like 2am here) through Kara, powering through all the bosses, because the timer was due to set that morning and it was fun, even if we didn't quite clear Medivh's tower out. I think we stopped after Prince as none of us could keep our eyes open. But there's something heartbreaking about getting down to that final boss and calling it a day, knowing that you have to start all over again the following day. It's kind of soul destroying.Patch 3.2 finally offers an answer in the form of a raid lockout extension. If you're mid-raid and haven't a hope in hell of finishing by the reset, you can manually extended it for another week. But I wonder, constant readers, are you going to use it? Will it motivate you to finish a raid or do you think it slow progression down?
The Queue: The roof, the roof
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. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. I've received a load of e-mails, tweets, whispers, and whatever else since Eliah posted this past weekend's WRUP. Yes, my garage burned down. No, nobody was hurt. No, the house didn't burn down, the siding just melted a little. No, that wasn't my car, it was my neighbor's car. Yes, my office has smelled like someone barbequeing since it happened and I can't get the smell to go away. I appreciate the concern, guys. You are all awesome. I guess I should pick a relevant Song of the Day, huh? How about Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire?Jack Spicer asked..."With each expansion Blizzard seems to be bringing underused talent specs around and making them highly desirable. In TBC, it seemed to be Feral Druids, Prot Pallies, Shadow Priests and BM Hunters. In Wrath, they really brought up Survival Hunters and Retribution Pallies.But I'm curious. From a PvE perspective, which talent trees are still universally lacking and laughable?"
The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution tips and tricks in Ulduar
I know, it's another Retribution post, but since we got hit with the nerf bat again (ever so slightly) I decided to devote one last column to the spec before I rotate back to Protection. Besides, my past month or so has been spent raiding Ulduar as Retribution (with the first few forays as Holy) so I think that's what I'll talk about for now. Rather than talk about specific boss strategies, we'll talk about the little things we can do to perform at our best in Ulduar. Flame Leviathan First up is Flame Leviathan. Obviously, none of the usual strategies will apply here but one key point players should remember is that the vehicles scale with gear. This means having to prepare an outfit set optimized for the encounter. One thing to note about vehicle scaling is that it doesn't look at stats, just iLevel. Optimizing a gear set for this means putting the highest iLevel item you have in every slot. For "pure" classes, this is usually their normal set-up, but for Paladins who keep several sets of gear, an iLevel-optimized outfit can be composed of healing items, a few tank items, some DPS items, and even PvP gear. Players can use AddOns such as RatingBuster to determine an item's iLevel and outfit managers such as Outfitter or Blizzard's new in-game equipment manager to quickly swap gear.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tips for raiding Ulduar, part 1
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we discuss some of the tips and tricks to remember when raiding Ulduar.With Ulduar laid wide open, many Rogues and their guilds are flocking to its gates. Brand new bosses and shiny gear upgrades are just two of the reasons that I've seen so many 'LFM Ulduar' advertisements in trade chat. However, as the dungeon is still relatively new, many of us haven't had the opportunity to confront every giant-sized boss in the instance.I've compiled a list of basic roles for each boss fight in the instance, as well as a list of cool tricks and tips you can use to make your first (or eighth!) run through Ulduar as smooth as possible. Blizzard has included several fights in the instance where it is advantageous to bring a Rogue, and being able to proactively seize these opportunities will put you at the head of the pack.
Martin Fury: What would you have done?
Everyone is in a furor over the Martin Fury/Karatechop controversy -- and we've had a few requests already to poll you guys on exactly what you think about it, so here you go. The story, as we've ascertained, is that Karatechop got the item by way of a low-level guildie (who'd been receiving items after he'd had his account hacked), "didn't even contemplate a ticket," and had the guildie bring the item into normal Ulduar with him. They downed Ignis with it, and after that proceeded out of the instance, flipped it to Heroic, and used the item thirteen more times, completing even some world first hard modes with it.So the question is: what would you have done? Lots of players say they wouldn't have touched it, and that it was clearly an item they shouldn't have had. Others say that Karatechop and his guild did what anyone would have done -- it was Blizzard's mistake and they were just taking advantage of it. We'd like to know, so here's a poll: what would you have done if Martin Fury showed up in your mailbox?%Poll-29715%Of course, Karatechop eventually got banned for what he did, but answer that question under the premise that he didn't necessarily know that at the time. And there's another question here: lots of players say that they are surprised Karatechop and his guild didn't open a GM ticket right away -- clearly Blizzard didn't mean to send him the item, and he should have contacted them to get it back. But others aren't so sure. The second question is: no matter what you did with the item, would you have told the GMs about it?%Poll-29721%
The Daily Quest: Of goodbyes and Ulduar progression
We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Another blogger is calling it quits. This time it's Hoof 'n Healz giving their goodbyes. Farewell, o Resto Shaman! Soap Bubble has been making some progress in Ulduar and has a few tips for Healers that are preparing to face Kologarn. Mirror Shield is feeling a little bit of raid fatigue after a flurry of raiding, but the boss kills just don't stop. Herding Cats found Flame Leviathan prep to be a little like... well, herding cats, and they've pieced together a basic strategy for Razorscale. Matticus has a strategy of his own for Razorscale. Healers, you'll probably want to check this one out. Tachyon gave Ignis a pass and moved on to Kologarn. They managed to bring the giant down, and you can watch the whole thing in the video above. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
How to activate Ulduar's hard modes
You may have heard that a number of guilds have cleared Ulduar to Yogg-Saron already, which to me is perfectly fine. I like to think that a lot of good, properly-coordinated guilds will kill Yoggy this week, and the Blues agree with me. Of course, this week's Yoggy kills were on the easiest possible difficulty, so world first or not, it doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of fame and fortune.This is the beauty of Ulduar -- if you want prestige (and the best gear), you have to earn it by flexing your raiding muscle and beating encounters on their respective hard modes. If you don't have the chops or the time for the highest difficulty content, then you can still beat the instance and see every encounter.But, of course, you want those 239-level items.So you should probably read after the jump and find out how to activate each boss' hard mode, yeah?
Patch 3.1 Secrets of Ulduar round up
We've talked a whole lot about Ulduar in the last few months, and a lot of great Ulduar-related resources have cropped up. So you don't need to dig through our entire site to find what you're looking for this fine Tuesday morning, I've tried to collect the most useful pieces of our current Ulduar content into one nice list for you. Enjoy! Ulduar Mania kicked off with this preview of Ulduar from the official EU community site. And then this video! You can listen to this song by Summergale and Cranius titled 'Ulduar' while you read this insanely long list! To be sure you'll never be lost in Ulduar, we've covered a few sites with maps of the zone. Check out an early iteration of the Ulduar achievements. Most of them have remained the same, but note that some of the numbers in the post were placeholders and have since been updated.
Shifting Perspectives: Ulduar class preview, part I
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, our author pretends to know more about Ulduar than she actually does, which makes a refreshing change from pretending to know more than she actually does about things that are already in the game.Hail and well met, Druids. For the next three Shifting Perspectives columns, I'm going to take a look at Druid class roles on Ulduar fights. If patch 3.1 hits earlier than expected (I'm currently betting that it hits in late April/early May), I'll try to squeeze these in a little bit faster than once per week. But with luck (and, I hope, a parade of annoying bugs for Blizzard to hunt down and squash before they let the patch go live), we should have some information to chew on before we set foot in a live Ulduar. Now watch Blizzard deploy the frickin' patch next week.I have not gotten the opportunity to test all of these fights personally because I'm only on the North American PTR, and some fights -- like Yogg-Saron -- haven't been available for testing at all. What I write here is going to be a compilation of personal experience, details concerning boss abilities available on the PTR version of Wowhead, information I've gotten from pestering various people on both PTR's, and news available around the web, principally from WoW Insider's previous PTR testing, Wowwiki, MMO Champion, and World of Raids. Bear in mind that some things here may wind up being very different when Ulduar actually goes live, so take numbers and conjecture here with a grain of salt. I'm going to assume that basic boss mechanics are likely to remain the same or similar, so let's get started with the first three encounters.
The Queue: Procs and more on Patch 3.1
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.Good morning, ladies and gents! Or afternoon for some of you. Probably evening for a few others! It's morning for me, though. That's all that matters, isn't it? Indeed. Adam is out of the office today thanks to a blizzard murdering his internet connection, so I'll be covering for him even though today is technically his turn to do The Queue. Lazy such-and-such, letting weather get in his way. Grumble.Ian R. asked...Do you think the first couple of bosses in Ulduar can be PUG'd on easy mode? Like Sartharion and Vault of Archavon?
Ulduar on the 3.1 PTR: Ignis the Furnace Master
Coming back to my post as official 3.1 PTR raid reporter after an offensive usurping by my dubiously sentient coworker Alex Ziebart, it's time for a new roundup of tonight's PTR Ulduar testing events. Last night we got a taste of the Flame Leviathan fight, which brought us motorcycles and tanks and floating pyrite containers, but tonight ... tonight we got a taste of a good, old-fashion player vs. comically gigantic dude raid encounter with Ignis, the Furnace Master. Matt "Matticus" Low, the aforementioned plantlike Mr. Ziebart, and I formed a 10-man raid. As usual, Lead Encounter Designer Scott Mercer, a.k.a. Daelo, was around for the fun. Making travel considerably easier was last night's addition of a teleporter to different areas of the dungeon. Our trip past the large gate guarding the end of the Iron Concourse to the Colossal Forge was instant and uneventful. Then we waited for our barrel-chested braid-bearded friend to spawn. This writeup will be spoiler-heavy. If you don't wish to know anything about this fight, don't click below. You've been warned.
This week's Ulduar testing schedule
Daelo, our cloth-wrapped lead encounter designer, has just posted the schedule for which bosses will be tested in Ulduar on the 3.1 PTR this week. As you may be aware, they're not opening all bosses for testing at once (at least, not yet), and bosses are up only during certain hours, to let the devs watch players (try to) beat them. This week, here's the schedule for the North American realms: Tonight, Tuesday 3/3, starting at 4 PM PST now: Flame Leviathan, the (in-)famous vehicle boss. Only the 10-man version should be tested, as the 25-man one is "not properly tuned." I'm really curious to see how this fight is going to work out. Wednesday, 3/4, starting at 4 PM PST: Ignis the Furnace Maker. Thursday, 3/5, starting 4 PM PST: Hodir. And for the European realms: Wednesday, 4/3, 1 AM CET: Flame Leviathan, 10-man only. Thursday, 5/3, 7 PM CET: Thorim. Friday, 6/3, 7 PM CET: Freya. Thorim on Thursday, Freya on friday? I think they did that on purpose. Daelo also promises that General Vezax and Razorscale will be soon available for European testers, and XT-002 Deconstructor for US testers. Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.
