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Totem Talk: 2011 in review for elemental shaman
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.) It's hard for me to believe that Cataclysm has only been out for slightly over one year, especially given how we're already on the last raid of the expansion. It's been a turbulent year for the shaman class, and elemental as a spec is no exception. Between legendaries, highly fluctuating DPS, and more tweaks to AoE then I care to count, elemental has had more than its fair share of ups and downs this year. Tier 11: The lows Elemental was not a strong DPS class in the first tier of Cataclysm raiding. Fights like heroic Halfus, Maloriak, and Sinestra brought our lack of competitive AoE damage into the limelight, while Cho'gall, Conclave of Wind, and Ascendant Council all highlighted how elemental's mobile DPS was terribly low. With Unleash Elements and shocks being our only mobile cast -- not to mention low levels of haste that left us with terribly slow Lightning Bolt casts -- and we really struggled to pump out respectable numbers on any fight that wasn't Patchwerk-esque.
Lichborne: What to do with your new level 85 death knight in patch 4.2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. So you've dinged level 85 on your death knight. Now what? Patch 4.2 bought a lot of new things for level 85s of almost any PVE playstyle to do, so you have options to choose from. This week, we'll take a look at some of the best things you can do to get yourself geared up and ready to hit the next level of PVE play once you hit level 85.
Tier 11 normal mode raid bosses to give valor points again
Good news for everyone tired of all those trolls: Tier 11 normal modes will once again give valor points. According to Community Manager Daxxarri, raids will receive 35 valor points on 10-man bosses and 45 valor points on 25-man bosses. This hotfix should be live within the next few hours. For the full text of the announcement, check after the break.
The Queue: The weather outside
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mathew McCurley will be your host today. Everyone seems to be knocked out by summer storms. Alex is stormed in, raiders were afk'ing because of tornados, and people across the land are screaming about lost internet connections. You know what this means, right? We need to demand that the government create better weather-controlling devices. I mean, really, it's the year 2011... Aftermathmatical asked: My Q, is that with the new PvP mount for RBGs, will we be able to send those to the opposite faction? I understand that we won't get a horde mount on my alliance character and vice versa, that they would change to the right faction. Will they allow this though, or will we have to earn them within our faction? (I know I know killing tons of alliance on my horde mage so I can earn and alliance mount on my Ally druid lol) Most likely yes. When you purchase the level 25 guild mount reward (which is Bind on Account) you can send it to opposite faction members and it magically turns into that faction's version of the mount (either the lion or the scorpion.) I am assuming that the PVP mounts work exactly the same way. There's no reason to believe it would be anything different.
Spiritual Guidance: Priest healing tips for tier 11 heroic mode raids
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen is busy looking in the mirror instead of playing a proper spec. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com, produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. In previous weeks, Spiritual Guidance has tackled how to heal the various raid encounters in tier 11. This week, we're going to revisit each boss on heroic difficulty. Once more, I'll be examining which spec is better equipped to handle the fight while also examining the differences in the new encounter and how to deal with them. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started. First, I want to point out that a major difference between any heroic and normal mode encounter is that abilities in heroic do an increased amount of damage. In order to avoid being redundant, please keep in mind that when I point out the differences between modes that the need for more healing will be assumed. If the increased damage significantly impacts the strategy of the fight, however, I will explain how.
Shifting Perspectives: Examining the tier 12 set bonuses
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we preview tier 12. Hey, folks. Today's going to be a slightly shorter edition of Shifting (say that three times fast), as I'm a little under the weather, but I've been wanting to take a peek at the upcoming tier 12 set bonuses for bears and resto. As a quick update to a previous post, I occasionally get into trouble in this column by assuming that feral changes are only ever going to concern bears. We were spoiled by having Chase Hasbrouck (also known as Alaron of The Fluid Druid) around recently to cover the cat portion of Shifting Perspectives. The strength nerf in patch 4.2 is in fact a noticeable nerf to our cat brethren, even if it's not going to affect bears quite so much. Kalon's comment is a good explanation as to why. On that note, we're now looking for a new kitty columnist, so please apply if you're interested!
Patch 4.2: Normal mode tier 11 encounters nerfed
Patch 4.2 PTR testing is in full swing, and we've got another round of patch notes, courtesy of Zarhym and the official Warcraft blog. Today's notes are primarily a metric ton of nerfs to normal mode encounters in Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight, and Throne of the Four Winds. The nerfs were explained by Nethaera as follows: Nethaera With the upcoming content patch, 10- and 25-person Normal mode raid encounters will be receiving a comprehensive set of tuning adjustments to decrease their difficulty. These changes will allow players, groups, and guilds who have yet to experience the content in Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight, and Throne of the the Four Winds an opportunity to do so. With the addition of a new tier of armor and weapons, we want to make the previous tier more accessible in ways other than just a shift of currency type, so we are making item level 359 gear purchasable for Justice points in the upcoming content patch. source Follow us after the break for the full list of patch notes.
Ask the Devs round 5 achievement questions answered
Ask the Devs, Blizzard's developer community question and answer feature, continues with round 5, an in-depth look at achievements detailing the difficulty of changing achievement, making certain rewards account-wide, and whether removed content is ever going to be a part of the game again. Check out the full question and answer session after the break. Quote: Q: When will achievements finally be awarded account-wide? – Larosh (Europe [German]), Eneia & Payasos (Europe [Spanish]), Rageudder & Kellgros (Europe [English]), ??????? (Europe [Russian]), Nyn (North America/ANZ), ?????? (Korea) A: Making achievements Battle.net account-wide is something we'd like to do, but it's not a goal we could provide a current timetable for. All of the original World of Warcraft coding was done with the expectation that the data on every realm would always be independent. Now that we are trying to make as many things as possible account-wide, we're having to rebuild all of those systems. It is absolutely something we want to do, but it will take a lot of time away from other features. source
Ask the Devs Round 4: Weapons and armor questions answered
Ask the Devs, the ongoing, in-depth Q&A series focusing on specific aspects of World of Warcraft, continues with round 4 answers to your questions about weapons and armor. As in the past, the devs hand picked user questions and gave detailed answers, shedding new light on some of the design intricacies that go into creating the World of Warcraft. There are some interesting questions this time around, as always, and even some more interesting answers. Highlights include the need for more armor models, a cool idea about buying quartermaster outfits, the drop rate of the legendary shards for 10- and 25-man raiding, and an interesting fix to prevent players rolling need on items in the random dungeon finder only to throw them up on the auction house. The full Q&A is after the jump.
Spiritual Guidance: Priest healing strategies for Maloriak and Nefarian
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow and runs a counterfeit penny operation out of his basement. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. It's a very special occasion on Spiritual Guidance today; spring has come, which means for the first time in months, you get to read about priest healing while simultaneously anticipating that the weather is going to be nice soon. What? That isn't exciting? Okay, fine, whatever ... I tried. I'm just going to go use the last of my Blossoming Branches on Fox right before the tank pulls so I can screw up his DPS rotation then. No! Okay, seriously, today on Spiritual Guidance we'll be finishing up Blackwing Descent with the last two bosses in the raid instance, Maloriak and Nefarian. As you know, we've been steadily working through all the tier 11 raid bosses and examining how to heal for them as a holy or discipline priest. After you've read this, you'll be able to heal your raid to victory and finally stop dealing with that damn elevator.
Lichborne: Tier 11 raid and valor point tank gear for death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. With no sign of patch 4.1 going live so far and all the tier 12 raids not coming until patch 4.2, the best place to get gear is still in raid dungeons. Last week, we covered all the DPS gear you could pull from raids -- so this week, we'll cover tank gear. Note that with tank gear, there is still a pretty healthy debate going on in the DK community over whether mastery or avoidance is the best secondary stat set to get. We've covered this extensively in past columns, so I won't go too much over it again, but suffice it to say that you'll have to examine the boss fights you're doing, your raid makeup, and your own playstyle to see what works for you, although you should strive to fit in four pieces of tier gear in order to get your set bonus. This list will cover primarily raid gear and valor point gear, but reputation rewards and crafted items will be mentioned where they are a viable possibility for the slot.
Lichborne: Tier 11 raid and valor point gear for death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Join World of Warcraft's first hero class as we head into a new expansion and shed the new kid on the block label. With 4.1 on the PTR, I've been hearing the usual grumbling. Why should we raid anymore? We'll just wait for the next tier of raiding and get all new good stuff. This argument always sort of strikes me as a little bit off, but it definitely doesn't apply to this patch. Not only is patch 4.1 heroic gear only going to be item level 353, but we won't get a new raiding tier until patch 4.2. That means you probably have multiple months left in which the best gear still comes from raiding tier 11 content. With that in mind, this week we'll look at all the item level 359 gear available in game and figure out what's best for the up-and-coming DPS death knight. This guide will primarily cover raid gear and valor point purchases, with BoE world drops and crafting and reputation purchases where they seem to fit well into the hierarchy of what to wear.
Spiritual Guidance: Healing Chimaeron and Atramedes as a priest
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow and decorative cross stitching (who knew he was so crafty?). Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. This week on Spiritual Guidance, we'll be returning to Blackwing Descent where, after meeting sudden and untimely deaths at the bottom of an elevator shaft, we can respawn and face our next two healing challenges: Chimaeron and Atramedes. You may recall that not long ago, we examined two other bosses in Blackwing Descent, Magmaw and the Omnotron Defense System. If you can handle those two, these bosses are just a tiny step up in difficulty and should be no match for your priestly prowess.
The Light and How to Swing It: Nobody's wearing the Reinforced Sapphirium Regalia
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why the above bowl of hot water is better than our holy tier set. While it may have been a while since you've last seen a paladin sporting it, our Lightsworn Garb set from Icecrown Citadel was once the top tier gear available. Tirion Fordring even bought himself a full set to wear. The two-piece bonus was simply amazing, as it gave us our healing a boost while Divine Illumination was active. The four-piece bonus was less than attractive due to the way it scaled with haste, but there were two good pieces of the set (helm and shoulders) that nearly every holy paladin focused on acquiring. I lamented then that less than half of our tier pieces were optimal and that the four-piece bonus was nowhere near compensating for the lack of haste. Our current tier set, the Reinforced Sapphirium Regalia, is even worse. Not a single piece is itemized with our strongest secondary stat, haste. In addition, the set bonuses are so ineffective that it's almost a joke to wear the gear. There are better-itemized options available elsewhere, and so our set is left sitting in the valor point vendor's inventory.
Lichborne: Haste and spell hit issues in patch 4.0.1 and beyond
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Patch 4.0.3 and the Cataclysm expansion are approaching quickly, and frankly, we're in pretty good shape right now. Yes, there are issues you can point at in almost every tree that could be just a little better, but honestly, most of them are pretty minor. We're really solidly set up for leveling (if you don't mind leveling in a tank spec), dungeon running, and even the first tier of raiding, and for now we can feel pretty secure about ourselves (or at least about our class). That said, there are almost always improvements to be made, and I do want to take a little bit of time to talk about the issue of the unholy tree's complicated love-hate relationship with haste. Now, you're still going to be stacking and gemming strength as much as possible when you gear up. Strength is still king, don't get me wrong, and you'll always want to get your melee hit capped out. But after that, haste pretty much rules for the roost for unholy. It vaults past critical strike rating and leaves mastery somewhere two or three miles down the road, it's so good. This isn't too much of a problem at first glance. It's arguably a little boring stacking one secondary stat over others, but that's more or less a reality of gearing up a DPS. It's very rare that two secondary stats share equal billing. We did have a problem with reaching the GCD cap early on in the beta, but the addition of a GCD reduction element to Unholy Presence fixed that pretty handily. That said, there's still two big problems, one of which primarily affects unholy, the other of which affects all three trees.
Scattered Shots: Hunter tier 11 set
Every Monday and Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. Cataclysm is still several weeks away, and for most of us, raid content is yet more weeks beyond that. But it's never too soon to start drooling over new gear, and what's more deserving of our drool than our very first raid set of Cataclysm? The hunter tier 11 Lightning-Charged set gets us off to a killer start in Cataclysm with very nice and useful set bonuses right out of the gate. Of course, the set looks like you're wearing a skinned murloc, but whether that's a bad thing or a moment of sublime joy depends on your personal taste and history with murlocs. Personally, I'm happy to be wearing their hollowed-out head. Glrgl-murfl this, ya bastards. Join me after a cut for an in-depth look at the new hunter set, including exactly how all the set bonuses work and some preliminary numbers of the set bonus DPS contributions to each spec.
Cataclysm Beta: Death knight, hunter and paladin tier 11 previewed
The fine folks at MMO-Champion once again peel back the layers and show us the future -- at least, the future of what we'll be wearing. While the hunter set is interesting, I'd have to say I actually really like that paladin set, shown above. It's no Judgement, but it's pretty solid nonetheless. They also revealed the death knight tier 11 set earlier, and it's very dramatic looking. The red set is pretty spectacular. (I restrained myself from saying it was hot. You're welcome.) Head on over and take a look. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.
The Queue: The one with the fashion-forward warlock
Welcome to your daily dose of The Queue. With Mike Sacco quite literally powerless, his precious Queue was left unguarded and captured by Fox Van Allen. All members of the Van Allen faction shall enjoy a 5 percent buff to damage and experience for the 24-hour duration, and Spirit Shards may now be collected. Ladies and gentlemen, I have returned to host The Queue once more. I know you've missed me. You're probably saying to yourself, "Oh man, I wish Fox could do The Queue every day of the week, four times a day!" This, of course, would be folly. You can indeed have too much of a good thing. Remember when Who Wants to be a Millionaire first aired on TV? It was on maybe once a week. And then it got so popular that they started adding extra shows. Turn on your TV on Wednesday and -- boom -- there was Regis. Turn it on Thursday -- Regis. Friday -- Regis. Sunday -- Regis. Sooner or later, you couldn't even take a trip to the mens' room without seeing Regis Philbin staring back at you from the urinal, asking you who the father of quantum physics was. It's Niels Bohr, OK?! Niels freakin' Bohr. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm trying to go to the bathroom here. Man. Sharvis asked: How has trade chat been since the last patch? Now that you can't spam in it, it seems slower-paced to me at least.
Cataclysm Beta: Tier 11 set bonuses revealed
Another week sees another beta patch, this one build 12942, and it's a doozy. Why do I say that, you ask? Well, for example, we've got our first look at the Tier 11 set bonuses thanks to the mighty dataminers at MMO-Champion. You'll notice that the death knight sets are officially blood and DPS now (enshrining blood's status as the DK tank tree), that a great deal of these set bonuses seem to increase either straight damage or critical strike chance for DPS sets, and that yes, there really is going to be an effort to push Templar's Verdict for paladin DPS. (You may notice other things, as well.) Step behind the curtain for a sneak peek.
