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Around Azeroth: Not very inviting, is it?
Reader Buman of Skullcrusher sends in this shot taken inside the Caverns of Time (inside the caverns, outside the instanced area). It's not really the sort of warm, inviting scenery that invites you to sit down and stay a while, though, is it? I personally tend to take massive glowing skulls as an ominous warning sign, but perhaps it's really just a friendly invitation to come inside and kill some things.Do you have a unique shot of Azeroth or Outland that you'd like to show off to the rest of the world? Tell us about it by e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com! You can attach a picture file or send us a link to one -- and don't worry about formatting, we'll take care of that part. See more of your pics from Around Azeroth. %Gallery-1816%
Meet the new endgame, much harder than the old
I don't know if you all have noticed yet, but the 5 man dungeons in Outland are hard. Like they actually require skill, group coordination, and class knowledge hard. Like Coldlight on the forums, I love it.When you first get in there, things start out fairly easy-- Ramparts and Blood Furnace bosses have their quirks (the last guy in Blood Furnace plays out like a mini-Geddon with the AoE, but he gives you so much warning, it's no real trouble to get away in time), but the good stuff starts coming later. In Slave Pens, there are trash mobs (not bosses) that lay down mind control, and they come with a whole crowd of people. There are 5 man bosses in Auchindoin that do some nasty AoE and bosses that require DPS control (the stuff that Dives yells about). Durnholde and Black Morass in CoT are two tough instances that grab on to you and don't let go until you're all dead or the instance is over. And then, just when you think you've broken everything Blizzard has to offer, you try Heroic mode, and the difficulty ramps right back up again (perhaps in disproportion to the gear offered, but that's another story).WoW is not a hard game by any means-- that's why so many people like it so much. But especially now, when almost no one has picked up the top endgame gear, more than a few groups are actually finding a serious challenge. I'm having a lot of fun working through it (wiping isn't that fun, but winning after the wipe is), but players who were just messing around in PUGs before are being forced to learn their stuff, or wipe out. It's a whole new endgame out there.
Fighting teenagers in Scarlet Monastery
Scarlet Monastery is one of the most-loved instances in the game, partly because the bosses in there are so memorable-- who's ever going to forget Harod yelling "Blades of Light!" or High Inquisitor Whitemane shouting "Arise, my Champion" (along with the ensuing realization that you're now fighting two bosses at the same time)?That why it's so cool to see, in the first Caverns of Time instance in Old Hillsbrad, all our favorite Scarlet Monastery minions running around as children. I ran CoT for the first time last week, and I spent a long time wandering about Old Southshore, listening to the conversation in the inn, and checking out all the old lore. I saw both Herod as a boy, and little "Sally Whitemane" as a pigtailed girl running around oblivious of her distant future.Except, wait a minute. Apparently the future isn't as distant as it seems. Zerolimite points out on the forums that Old Hillsbrad is really only the Hillsbrad of seven years ago. Which means that even if Sally Whitemane, blonde and pigtailed, is even thirteen, that only makes her at most 20 in Scarlet Monastery. So what's with the white, err... mane? Likewise, Herod is just a kid seven years ago, so that makes him like 15 when he's hulking and yelling in the Armory. All this time, we've been killing teenagers.And as an interesting sidenote, seven years ago means it's very likely our characters were alive as well. Our guild's main tank, Paws of Thunderhorn, has said that he was actually interred in Durnholde Keep with Thrall, but even though we poked around the camps there, we never saw him (or at least recognized him-- this was a whole seven years ago). As for my Orc Shaman, he definitely was held in an internment camp, but it was further north, near Lordaeron. I tried to head up there and see if I couldn't pull off a little Back to the Future action, but for some reason, I couldn't seem to leave Old Hillsbrad...
High-level instances bugged
The Raids and Dungeons forumgoers are up in arms about major bugs in Tempest Keep's Mechanar and the Caverns of Time Black Morass event. The Black Morass, also known as Opening the Dark Portal, features portals of angry dragons coming to stop Medivh from opening the Dark Portal. You have to kill these mobs to preserve the timeline. However, it looks like the spawns of the portals are either really random or really bugged. Sometimes multiple portals spawn at the same time, and sometimes you wait ten minutes and nothing spawns at all. Poptrix of Bloodhoof suggests that setting loot to free-for-all and looting everything off the corpses evens out the spawn times a bit. Tempest Keep's Mechanar features an elevator that appears to have some issues being visible. Some people can see it and others can't. This bug killed a run of Mechanar for my guild a couple nights ago. Hortus on the Bug Report Forum says that Blizzard is working on it, but many people trying to get attuned for Karazhan are pretty upset that they can't progress in Mechanar. Kink of the infamous "PALS FOR LIFE" suggests a fix:
