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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Firelands non-heroic raid gear
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Patch 4.2 is here. As I indicated last week, this week I will be discussing Firelands gear options for warriors. I expect I will have to do at least three weeks to cover all the possible upgrades for both DPSers and tanks, especially with Avengers of Hyjal rep rewards, regular and then heroic Firelands raid gear. If we get it done faster, that'll be nice. Also, I'm a tauren now. That's right, I'm playing Horde again. I do still love worgen, but for now, I'm a tauren. I got a pretty necklace this week. It's one of the things I would like to tell you about. So let's talk about Firelands.
Raid Rx: Lord Rhyolith and Beth'tilac healing impressions
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading on the Matticast. Firelands is here! Yay! The other night, my raid took down entry bosses Beth'tilac and Lord Rhyolith. Both have their share of intensive healing phases. This week, I'll walk you through a little bit of the threats involved and approach the two encounters from the mindset of both a healing leader and a healer. I'll let you know when to save and when to use your cooldowns. How much have the encounters changed since the last time I faced them on the PTR? I have to say not much, since the mechanics and damage are about the same. To be fair, when I tried them out on the PTR, it was done with a 10-player group. I found the live version 25-man to be much more forgiving at times, despite the high output of damage.
Ready Check: The quest for Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest
Ready Check helps you prepare yourself and your raid for the bosses that simply require killing. Check back with Ready Check each week for the latest pointers on killing adds, not standing in fire, and hoping for loot that won't drop. There is one thing about WoW that is a constant. No matter what happens in the game, there is one truth that will never change. That is, people get color-crazy. Blue gear, purple gear, orange gear -- people care about the color of the items that you are wearing. When a new legendary is introduced into the game, that becomes the biggest thing on everyone's lips. It is the new hot item, the one thing that everyone wants. Patch 4.2 introduced one such item. Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest is the big deal of this raiding tier, and it is the thing that people want. Last week, I did a little blurb about the staff, but that alone wasn't enough. There've been plenty of emails asking for more information on the specifics of the legendary, so here are your answers. (For those wondering, next week will see the start of the Ready Check raiding guides, so make sure to tune in for those as we go an an adventure of killing all of this tier's big bads. For now, let's talk about a staff.)
The Light and How to Swing It: That burning sensation while first tanking Firelands
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Here it is, the first week of the new patch, and we brave heroes have begun to roam the sulphuric wastelands that make up Ragnaros' domain. We need to wade through a sea of endless trash, smash down roaming Molten Lords, and begin to topple the Firelord's lieutenants one by one. In today's post, I want to go over my initial impressions of the new raid -- specifically, what the trash is like, an in-depth look at how my group dealt with our first boss, and a bunch of other myriad little things I noticed over the overpowering stench of burning raider corpses. I'll also teach you the fun new game that's all the rage: "Spin the DPS."
Patch 4.2 hotfixes for June 29
Firelands trash keeps respawning on top of you? Can't figure out why you're not Skull Bashing? Keep getting stuck in combat long after the last enemy is killed? Wondering what the deal is with those damnable Cauldrons of Battle that run out of flasks too quickly and fail to despawn? You're not alone. Blizzard has been keeping track of all these issues (and more) and wound up correcting a number of them in today's series of hotfixes. Some highlights: Skull Bash should actually work in Firelands now. Shannox's trash now respawns at 4-hour intervals, up from 2 hours. Cauldrons no longer lose charges when they're clicked by someone who already has a Flask of Battle. That's just a small taste -- a whole slew of changes will soon be hitting servers, if they're not there already. The full list of hotfixes is available after the break.
Firelands: WoW Insider's first impressions
Pssst. Hey you. Yeah, you. Come here. Do you like clearing trash? Is clearing trash, like, the best? Do you love trash respawns on tight timers? Well, have I got the raid for you! Patch 4.2 has been live on servers for a little over 24 hours now, which means that the Firelands raid is just as new. Hardcore raiders that we are (well, some of us), a team of WoW Insider writers headed into the raid instance on its inaugural night with the intent of offering our first impressions. How would the new encounters test healers? What kind of issues would tanks face? Would crowd control efforts would be necessary? Matt Low of Raid RX, warrior tank Mat McCurley, and enhancement shaman Josh Myers all headed into the Firelands to find out. What follows are their insights and opinions from the point of view of a healer, a tank, and a DPSer, respectively. %Gallery-127388%
Blizzard Insider #39 goes behind the scenes with the art of the Firelands
Patch 4.2 brought back one of the most iconic WoW villains in the game's history -- Ragnaros, the Firelord. Blizzard Insider interviewed two critical members of the dev team, Lead Level Designer Jonathan Dumont and Lead Environment Artist Gary Platner, to discuss the process and philosophy behind the Firelands' design. Dumont and Platner go into detail about the origins of the Firelands, the design decisions that made the cut and some that didn't, and how the environment animates with the new particle and water effects. Firelands is one of the most cohesive and engaging locales Blizzard's team has brought to life, in my opinion. Much like Deepholm and Vashj'ir, the Firelands exists to bring the realm of fire to life, when the daunting Sulfuron Keep only existed in our imaginations prior. An interesting piece of info was that Ragnaros' model was rebuilt from scratch, completely overhauling his skeleton, animations, and feel. The new Ragnaros is one of those things, to me, that the Cataclysm did right -- create a new thing with the heart and soul of the original. Ragnaros looks like he belongs. Check out the full interview after the jump.
Breakfast Topic: Patch 4.2 is upon us
Finally, patch 4.2 is upon us. Azeroth has undergone many changes since Cataclysm launched, and finally, we are getting the first new "tier" patch for this expansion. Suffice to say, I am very excited. Patch 4.2 represents to me many turning points for World of Warcraft that are putting it back on the path to cohesiveness. Cataclysm's launch was a success, and we were wowed by the features and the set pieces, but patch 4.2 feels like the first time we are getting to see new content that encapsulates the drive and cohesiveness of the Cataclysm motif. Patch 4.2 brings with it many new features. Players will be able to enter the Firelands, Ragnaros' domain, for a whole slew of new daily quests and player-specific progression. Seven new raid bosses await intrepid raiders, valor point gear will be knocked down to justice level, and the previous tier of content is becoming more accessible to raiders new and old. Loads of new companion pets and mounts await players willing to aid the Avengers of Hyjal's cause. Lucky raiders will also take part in an epic quest to forge the newest legendary item in WoW, Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest. I am especially interested and excited for the Molten Front and Regrowth daily hubs that are being introduced for max-level players in Hyjal, as the druids and sentinels break into Ragnaros' home turf, the Firelands, and lay siege for their survival. These dailies and daily hubs represent a philosophy that I love in MMOs -- your personal progression should matter just as much as the progression of the whole. You, individually, will be working with major lore characters and factions to put together the Hyjal offensive, and your decisions get to open up new quest areas and gear vendors in an order that you choose. Putting this type of control back in the players' hands feels like a Burning Crusade move, and I'm a man who loved him some Burning Crusade. What are you looking forward to when we get to log into patch 4.2? What's your first move in the face of invasion from the Firelands?
Arcane Brilliance: How to be legendary
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. The title of this week's column is a bit misleading. As we all know, mages are, by virtue of their magehood, already legendary. I probably should have called it "How to be more legendary," or "How to be legendarier." Too late now, it's already been typed. Last week, as I neared completion of Arcane Brilliance's mage guide to patch 4.2, I touched upon one of the more exciting aspects of our impending foray into the Firelands: Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest. Dragonwrath will be the new legendary staff available to casters in this patch. It will be difficult, but not by any means impossible, for a good guild to obtain. It will require a long term commitment to the new Firelands raid content. Most guilds will only obtain the staff once, and even the really high-speed guilds will only be able to pick up this staff for a select few of their caster members. It's an incredible piece of statistical candy. Dragonwrath will be the best-in-slot weapon for every variety of DPS caster the moment it becomes available, by a very large margin, and it will likely remain that way for the rest of this expansion and into a good portion of the next one. If you are able to get your hands on it, you won't be letting go of it any time soon. Absolutely every caster class/spec will want it, including hybrids and classes that use spirit. Take a look at your guild. How many level 85 DPS casters do you raid with? Now look at yourself. How many of you are there? No, your mirror images don't count. Those are your odds. So how do you lower those odds? How do you stack the deck a bit in your favor. My mission this week, ladies and gentlemen, is to help you be the chosen one in your guild who gets to wield this spectacular weapon. No, not you, warlock. My mission, this week as every week, is to see you die in a fire.
Totem Talk: Restoration's new patch 4.2 pre-raid gear
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the Raid Warning podcast), shows you how. Over the last few weeks we have covered raiding in the tier 11 normal modes. It spanned not one, not two, nor three or four weeks, but a whopping five! This was delayed mostly due to all the various changes and questions we had over the course of the last patch. This week I thought we would get a bit of a head start and start talking about patch 4.2 and the Firelands. More specifically, I thought we could start talking about the gear and items we can expect to see with the new content.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladin gear in patch 4.2
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 paladins are so awesome. I'm not a big fan of patch days. I hate needing to update all of my addons, I hate the endless spam of "hay were's the new vender?" in trade chat, and I hate how overcrowded the new zones are. While I think there's plenty to dislike, patch days aren't all bad. With patch 4.2's release date closing, we can look forward to Firelands and the new quest hub in Hyjal. The introduction of new reputations and raid bosses mean that there are both new challenges to be overcome and new rewards to be obtained. The good news is that the gear we'll be seeing in patch 4.2 is much better itemized for holy paladin than what we saw in the first tier of Cataclysm raiding. Holy paladins are the only spec that uses plate gear with intellect on it, and so it's always a bit interesting to see gear that's not that good for us. Our potency should improve significantly from both the pure ilvl boost from the new gear, but also due to the better selection of secondary stats.
The Queue: Combo breaker
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. Oh, you like Anne Stickney, do you? You like how she answers a lot of questions, hmm? I'm not going to be outdone by some lore-toting, tinfoil-hat-wearing mountain dweller. It's lightning round time, fools. As for why Ragnaros is the header image for the Queue, I just like the guy. What can I say? Trinket asked: I just finished watching the latest 4.2 trailer and was picturing tackling the new bosses on my Fire Mage when it occurred to me I'll literally be fighting Fire with Fire... My question is why aren't raid bosses made from fire immune to fire damage? Wouldn't it seem more appropriate that Frost would do more damage against a fire elemental boss? The simple reason is gameplay reasons. Forcing a mage to choose a different spec for Firelands is just not fun from a gameplay perspective. Back in the vanilla days, Molten Core mobs were immune to fire damage and mages who wanted to raid went frost. I forgot if arcane was viable back then -- someone please remind me. I didn't pay attention to mages back in the olden days. Blizzard has said many times in the past that gameplay concerns trump common sense in many instances. Fire mages should not be penalized for playing fire throughout an entire tier of raiding. Sure, it "makes sense" according to made up fantasy physics or whatever, but it's just not fun for mages. It's unnecessary clutter that people confuse with depth, kind of like resist fights.
Patch 4.2 Rage of the Firelands trailer now live
Hot off of the official World of Warcraft Youtube channel, we have the official patch 4.2 trailer, and it's a doozy. Our favorite ex-Warchief, Go'el (you know him better as Thrall, no doubt) faces off against the Firelord himself, and we get to see exactly what Rag has in store for not only Mount Hyjal and the World Tree but the entire world. Death, destruction, all that kind of thing. It's an elemental donnybrook. I gotta say, that's one heck of a well executed trailer. Hearkens back to the Gods of Zul'Aman and the Black Temple trailer for sheer awesome, and those were two of my absolutely favorite patch trailers. I'm excited. Let's go save the world, everybody. The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new Tier 12 armor!
Valor point awards for tier 12 bosses increased
There's terrific news this morning for those planning on raiding The Firelands when patch 4.2 launches: Blizzard has quietly increased the amount of Valor Points earned from downing tier 12 bosses and Occu'thar, the new boss in Baradin Hold. Patch 4.2 Public Test Realm Guide - [Updated 6/14] Valor & Justice Points The number of Valor Points awarded for killing a boss in the Firelands is 70 120 in 10-player mode, and 90 140 in 25-player mode. The number of Valor Points awarded for killing Occu'thar in Baradin Hold is 35 120 in 10-player mode, and 45 140 in 25-player mode. source The previous, lower values caused a lot of hand wringing on the official forums. As people rightly complained, they did not allow raiders to reach the weekly cap simply by running the new tier 12 content. Players would have to choose between five-man heroics and stale tier 11 content to cap their VP, something many considered a time-consuming tedium. The new values allow ten-man raiders to (almost) reach the new 960 980 point VP cap with a full clear of all new tier 12 content; 25-man raiders can reach the cap by beating any seven of the eight. The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new Tier 12 armor!
Totem Talk: Enhancement's 4.2 shopping list
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. On Saturdays, Josh Myers tackles the hard questions about enhancement. Can we tank? Can we DPS with a two-hander? How does one shot web? The answer to the first two is "no," and roll a hunter for the third! I love loot. There might be something shameful about admitting it, but I don't care -- I really, really, really love loot. Killing a boss is cool. Spending time with friends is fun. But loot? Loot is something tangible (as tangible as anything in a virtual world can be) and something that is yours. It reminds you of what you have done, the victories you've achieved, as well as the very basic function of making you better. Also, gear makes you look cool. In a few short weeks, patch 4.2 will hit live servers. To some, this means new content: new quest hubs, a new raid, a billion new skins for hunter pets, etc. To me, it means one thing: new and shiny loot. Be it from valor points, the new Avengers of Hyjal faction, or from Firelands raid bosses, patch 4.2 is coming at us fast with loads of pretty purples to get our hands on, and I couldn't be more excited to preview them in this post.
Arcane Brilliance: The state of the arcane mage
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Well, almost every week. Okay, every other week. Semiannually. Every leap year. Seriously, sorry about the inconsistency lately. Family illness struck last week, and though the situation made it impossible for me to write a column, I still feel bad about leaving you guys in the lurch. I'll do everything in my power to keep the column weekly going forward. Because if I don't, the warlocks win. And they can never win, you guys. Never. With that out of the way, we're at the point in the expansion when most of what I said about the various specs early on is now almost completely false. I feel it is time again for me to address the mage nation about the state of the mage. This time around, though, I thought I'd tackle each spec separately, since the state of the mage is quite different depending upon what sort of mage you happen to be. Over the next three weeks, we'll take a hard look at the state of the three mage specs, focusing on PVE, and see where we're at as a class. We start this week with the left-most mage spec: arcane.
Raid Rx: Preparing for Firelands
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading on the Matticast. Now that we sort of have a release date for patch 4.2, the time has come to review everything healers should be aware of in anticipation. The gear "floor" is going to reset. This means you'll now purchase tier 11 items with justice points, so you'll have a chance to step into the new raids without having such a large gear deficiency. The valor vendor now has some new swag available for purchase. Your existing valor emblems will convert to justice points, so you may want to consider planning your item purchases around it (at least, if you still need to). Still worried about the gear gap? Don't worry, as the Avengers of Hyjal have some new faction items you can buy to help in your efforts against Ragnaros and his minions. Certain items that are picked up from the vendor or from raid trash can be upgraded to heroic item levels. At the end of the post, I'm going to list my thoughts on healing in tier 11, and I'd like to hear what you've thought of it.
Patch 4.2 PTR patch notes updated for June 10
Blizzard has once again updated the patch notes for patch 4.2, which will introduce the Firelands raid and the Molten Front and the Regrowth questing areas. The most recent versions of the patch have been marked "release," and PVP Season 9 is ending soon, which means we should see patch 4.2 drop in the next couple of weeks. Get your shoes on, kids -- we're almost at Grandpa Ragnaros' house. The most interesting change in these notes is the effective nerfing of raiding for valor points. The maximum number of valor points one can achieve weekly has been lowered to 980, down from 1,250. The number of valor points you could earn through heroic dungeons and the new Zandalari heroics were 490 and 980 respectively, and raiders could earn an extra 270 points on top of that. Now, it is possible to get the maximum amount of valor points from just doing Zandalari heroics. We do not yet know why this change was made. Raiders will understandably be perplexed, as one of the raid game's main draws was faster valor point gear. In addition, the prices for valor point gear have not changed, so certain pieces of gear that used to require two weeks will now require more collecting. Hit the jump for all the new changes.
Rediscovering the discovery factor
One of the aspects of the game that has to some degree been lost is the willingness to spend weeks upon weeks learning a boss fight, especially a boss who ends a dungeon. One of the memories I have of vanilla WoW is the pop in TeamSpeak when we killed Nefarian after nearly a month of working on him. People who didn't even make it into the raid got up and screamed. One of the reasons it took us so long to do it was because there wasn't really any other way to discover what bosses did besides going in there and dying to him repeatedly. Boss kill vids were in their infancy, and there weren't many places to go to get ideas on how other guilds got past X or Y. Our big stumbling block was the stream of adds before Nefarian landed; we kept trying to tank them, before someone got the bright idea of using warlocks and mages to AOE them in place. Over the years, the playerbase has built up an impressive array of options for boss fight information. Soon, the Encounter Journal will go one step beyond and incorporate loot drop and boss ability information into the game. It won't tell you how to fight a boss, but it will tell you what the boss can do to you.
Patch 4.2: New vanity items include balloons, Leyara's Locket
A few new items hit the PTR recently in a small patch. Wowhead News has found Alliance and Horde balloons in the game files. There is no indication yet where these balloons will appear, but they are listed as companion pets. Also added in the new patch is Leyara's Locket, which will be a reward from the quest The Rest is History. Blizzard had made mention during the Firelands Ask the Devs chat that players would be able to see some of the history of Archdruid Fandral and his transformation into Majordomo Staghelm, and Leyara's Locket will be a part of that. Using the locket "releases the memories contained within." Leyara is one of Staghelm's druids of the flame who is at the forefront of the assault of the Regrowth in Hyjal. Players run into Leyara many times during the Regrowth and Molten Front daily questing experiences. Hopefully, the memories that the locket releases will clue players in to more backstory involving Fandral and the druids of the flame. The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new Tier 12 armor!
