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Tell us about 'yer lucky charms!
So we've all had time to get used to the "lucky charms" icons for parties and (more commonly) raid targets. At first, I'll admit that they were a real source of confusion to me, but before very long I was extremely used to them. Since then, my guild uses them almost every chance we get, right down to harassing each other with them. Of course, now that I'm used to seeing and using them when running raids, I can't help but wonder how we ever got along without them in the first place. Those little icons have just made things so much more simple from a targeting aspect. (Of course, you should be targeting off your main assist, or other assigned assist if you're not the tank or MA, but the raid icons do help all that along...) This post on the World of Warcraft LJ today asking about what kind of raiding symbols are commonly used made me stop and wonder if there is really a somewhat "standard" icon used by many guilds and raiding groups for first target. However, as there are only a handful of answers there, I thought I'd bounce this question off everyone here and try to get a broader sampling -- just for curiosity's sake. So, tell us -- what are the "kill this first" icons for your guild or raiding group? Does your guild/group have pet names (like "thong") for some of the raid target icons? How about whether or not your raiding group uses them for other than marking kill/CC/tank targets, such as the one player who says that skull is used for people in trouble? My guild favors Skull for main assist, X for off-tank or second kill target, depending. From there, it's blue square for the Main Tank's target, purple diamond is sap target, thong and moon are CC targets. How about you?
WiebeTech's RT5, RT5e enclosures provide portable RAID solutions
Nah, WiebeTech's latest RAID enclosures can't quite offer up the internal storage capacity seen on Novac's iterations, but the RT5 and RT5e still pack an awful lot of capacity with a handle on top. The RT5 packs a nice variety of connection options, as users will find twin FireWire 800 ports along with one eSATA and USB 2.0 connector to boot, and there should be enough room in there to cram "up to 2TB" of HDDs for on-the-go redundancy. The RT5e differs ever-so-slightly by giving us the means to stuff five 750GB IDE drives in the case, leaving you with up to 3.75TB of space to read / write on via the sole eSATA jack. The enclosures sport five reloadable, lockable drive trays, a rugged exterior that shouldn't suffer from minor bumps and bruises, and while an empty rendition will run you $1,699.95, WiebeTech will gladly sell 'em pre-populated for anywhere from $2,259.95 to a steep $4,149.95 depending on drive selections.[Via Macworld]
Netgear acquires Infrant to boost storage offerings
Hot on the heels of yet another big time acquisition between Philips and DLO comes news that Netgear will be snapping up the privately-held Infrant Technologies for a cool $60 million in cash. All 34 employees will soon be wearing Netgear badges, and Infrant's CEO will move over and become Netgear's Vice President and General Manager for storage products. Essentially, Netgear is hoping that this move will strengthen the firm's presence in the enterprise and small-business storage realm, as it can now offer up a trusted name in RAID-based NAS products for SMB, SOHO, and the home. More specifically, the ReadyNAS, RAIDiator, and X-RAID portfolios were the targets of Netgear's desire, and while details on branding and the timeframe for the merge weren't noted, it sounds like Netgear's ready to get this party started on the double.[Thanks, Matt]
Screenshots from inside Zul'Aman
Borst from the World of Raids forums has reported back this morning with some screenshots from the other side of the Zul'aman portal on live servers. For those of you not familiar, Zul'Aman is an instance just chock-full o' trolls, much like Zul'Farrak and Zul'Gurub are. Unlike the other two, however, the trolls in Zul'Aman make use of the beefier-looking troll model -- specifically, the Forest Trolls who are currently seen in the south-eastern side of the Blood Elf starting area. It is also, per an interview with Tigole, a L70 raid instance, although I haven't personally seen anything official from Blizzard stating if it's a 25 man or a 10 man as yet. Still, for all that the post and exploration was limited to just a couple of interior shots, it's interesting to see some small part of it. Although I do think it would be nice if we weren't killing trolls quite so much... Someone might get the idea that all of us trolls are bad, and it would be troll sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! Then who would ya get to dance 'da capoeira, mon? [via World of Raids]
Add RAID to your Apple laptop -- for a price
Kind of an obvious hack, but if you can live life without your Apple laptop's internal optical drive on the day to day, Macenstein demonstrates using an MCE OptiBay add-on kit to pull the optical drive out of your machine and swap it out for another hard drive. The hundies invested open such possibilities as software RAID 0/1, a dedicated Windows drive, or simply extra internal storage -- but almost all of the above will take another hit on your battery, so be forewarned before you dare to crack open that fortress-like aluminum case.[Via Macenstien and Digg]
PTR notes: tier 6 stats
Wow, those PTR folks sure have been busy. Now we have the full stats for every single class's Tier 6 set(s), which drop in the Black Temple. This came to us almost simultaneously via MMO-Champion and World of Raids, though I have to say World of Raids's versions are a little less irritatingly watermarked. Looks like the names and set bonuses that came out a little while ago were correct, as far as I can tell.Ever one to have fun with math, I decided to add up the total stats on all the T6 gear, so you could compare them with other sets more easily. Here are the results (socket bonuses included):
"Why must you chase me, mechanical yeti?"
Let me preface this by saying that I absolutely love the tonks. I cackle with fiendish glee anytime one of my guild mates pulls out a tonk while we're waiting on the rest of the group to get to an instance. Tonk wars are no end of fun.One of the things that has been conspicuously absent from the game for some time was more mini-games like the tonks at the Darkmoon Faire. Sure, you get the Battered Steam Tonk Controller as a quest reward in the Bone Wastes, but I already have a tonk. I had hopes when I did the Arcano Scorpid quest in Shadowmoon Valley... It seems like you should be able to battle them. But sadly enough, as a guild mate and I found out, once you've turned in the quest, you can no longer control the arcano scorpids. (We can only guess that it is still possible that you can battle them, considering they have attacks that only work on other arcano scorpids. But you'd have to never turn in the quest to be able to continue playing.) And yes, you can do the bombing run over and over in Hellfire, but without actually playing against another person, where is the challenge in it?So, what we'd like to propose is for Blizzard to actually build in some form of mini-games. Not a true PVP thing, like dueling or battlegrounds, but something of a smaller and potentially sillier bent. Like giving folks control of the arcano scorpids after the quest is completed. That way you could play Scorpid Battle Mechs to break up the monotony of puking your guts out while searching for that one perfectly ripe Arakkoa egg. Or hey, how about making those non-combat pets useful and let us fight them against each other? I can just see it now... Magical Crawdad, I choose you!
PTR notes: Johnny McWeaksauce wants you to have T5
Well, this is certainly an innovative solution. Tonight the Black Temple opened on the test realms. However, Blizz seems to have realized that most people would not be sufficiently geared to test it out. So what did they do? Gave everyone free Tier 5 gear! That's right, if you go to the Terrace of Light (or the banks, or the inns) in Shattrath on the test realms, there is an NPC named Johnny McWeaksauce handing out free boxes full of T5 tokens and comparable items to fill the other slots, along with Black Temple keys.There's a slight catch: you need to be honored with the Violet Eye. Basically, this means Blizzard is selecting for people with some experience raiding Karazhan. You don't need that much raiding experience, though -- I got Honored clearing through Curator twice. Also, as you might expect, seemingly every single character on the PTR is either at McWeaksauce or the T5 vendors, resulting in horrendous lag and mountains of "This item is busy" errors. In fact, at this time, I still haven't managed to get my actual T5 -- it took a couple minutes of spam-clicking just to get the box of tokens. They tried to fix it by replicating Jimmy many times, but the bottleneck now is the T5 vendors. There's a few more of them, but not near enough.Anyway, if you're Honored or above with the Violet Eye and want to see what it's like to have phat epics, log on and try it out! Or, to save much frustration, wait a day or so. And here's a few tips: If you want cash for your epic mount or whatever on the PTR, you can grab some boxes of gear from Johnny and just vendor the gear. Free boxes of epics + epics sell for cash = profit. If you're an off-spec (Shadow Priest, Feral Druid), you can grab the box for your class to get the T5 gear and then pick an appropriate other class to get their box for gear for other slots. (Shadow Priests, for instance: grab a Priest box and a Warlock or Mage box.) There aren't any vendors for enchants or high-quality gems.
Specifics on flask changes, plus new elixirs
So by now you've probably seen a little bit about the current Alchemy shake-ups. But if you haven't been on the PTRs, you might not necessarily know the specific numbers involved. Fortunately, Eyonix made a nice post a little while ago about a specific example of the reduced effect and ingredients of flasks. Ready? You might want to be sitting down for this, it's a big nerf. Here we go:Flask of Mighty Restoration - Current Instant Regenerate 70 mana per 5 sec for two hours. Dreaming Glory x20 Mana Thistle x10 Fel Lotus x1 Flask of Might Restoration - Patch 2.1 Instant Regenerate 25 mana per 5 sec for two hours. Dreaming Glory x7 Mana Thistle x3 Fel Lotus x1 (Please Note: The drop rate for Fel Lotus is also being increased by approximately 15% in the same patch) Players will notice that while the effect of the flask has been dramatically reduced, so has the cost to create one. All alchemy flasks will be adjusted similarly.In short, the effect and cost of the flask have been reduced to about a third of their previous values. This is a big deal -- Tigole wasn't kidding when he said earlier that flasks had been significantly reduced. He then goes on to compare this to a similar elixir:
Nihilum downs Al'ar [update: loot]
Congrats guys! Nihilum, of H-Magtheridon-Eu, have defeated as far as I know the first boss second boss to go down in the Eye (the 25-man raid wing of Tempest Keep), Al'ar (the Phoenix God). This is a world-first. However, he bugged out by being killed by DoTs in the air, and so they didn't get any loot. Sad, sad times. Any readers been in the Eye yet?Edit: looks like they got their loot after all, presumably after contacting a GM. Here it is:[thanks, Delilah]
More on Alchemy changes
As recently revealed in the profession revamp preview, Alchemy is getting a pretty major nerf in 2.1: players are only going to be able to have two elixirs up at once, one each of offensive and defensive (the categorization of particular elixirs is yet to be determined, though in most cases it's fairly predictable). There's been some discontent about this among the alchemists, understandably, since it means less demand for their craftables. Now we have a bit more rationale, along with one major piece of new information: Flasks will work in this new system by taking up both the offensive and defensive elixir slots. So if you drink a flask, you can't have any other alchemy buffs up.The rationale Blizzard gave is along expected lines, and reminds me of the Decursive issue. Basically, since a cornucopia of buffs was theoretically available to raiders, Blizz had to tune boss encounters around having all those consumables on. If the encounters were tuned around few or no consumables, people like Nihilum would blow through all the content in a month, since they'd just flask up and would therefore be "overpowered" from the perspective of raid design. On the other hand, the way it is now has problems too. Since encounters are balanced with an array of flasks and elixirs in mind, they can be very hard if you don't use all those consumables, thus leading to heavy gold requirements for raiding.I think the solution they've come up with is pretty decent. It basically levels the playing field a certain amount, so that you have a much smaller opportunity to buy more leeway in your raid encounters. This means less gold for raiding. And new encounters are going to be balanced with only a few consumable buffs in mind, so in theory we shouldn't see much of a difference -- we'll be weaker, but so will the bosses. Current content will be rebalanced as necessary, although I imagine at least at first we'll see a stepping up in difficulty, at least those of us who are used to downing flasks and elixirs like so much Gatorade.Blue post copied after the cut. Oh, and one small ray of sunshine for alchemists: elixirs will now be able to stack with class buffs, so (for instance) an intellect elixir will now be useful, where before it would have not stacked with Arcane Intellect/Brilliance. This will lead to some new recipes being introduced that would previously have been useless. We are also going to be eventually getting some new recipes that might have been overpowered before.
The Drobo "storage robot"
There's been a lot of buzz the last few days about Drobo, the "storage robot" from Data Robotics. The best way to get a sense of what it can do is to watch this promotional video. Basically, the Drobo, which has four SATA drive bays, plugs into your Mac via USB and looks to the Mac just like a large USB mass storage device. According to our blog compadres over at Engadget (who have the full skinny), it "uses pooled virtualized storage" (not RAID) to create what looks to your Mac like a single drive, but which has data protection and redundancy features. Best of all, the hard drives are hot swappable. You can add and remove hard drives on the fly without corrupting your data either because of hard drive failure or merely to add more storage space. All of this is transparent to the host computer, which never notices anything has happened.All of this storage robotics coolness is expensive, however. The Drobo sells for $699 without any drives. You'll need to install at least two SATA hard drives in the Drobo and it handles all the rest. [Via UNEASYsilence]
Blue Notes: 25-man trash and EU arena teams
Trash mobs (i.e. non-boss mobs in instances, usually raids) have been the subject of a certain amount of discontent within the community recently. Blizz have said they're thinking about doing something about it, and now they're being a little more specific. Aeus, bearer of good news for the hardcore:We're going to be making some changes to trash mobs in Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep, to make them a bit easier, slower to respawn, and provide some greater incentive to killing them. We'll be continuing to tune and re-tune dungeons and encounters, but currently these are the two we're most concerned with and will be focusing on.I'm assuming when he says Tempest Keep he means the Eye, the 25-man raid wing of it. So while this is nice for those of us who are working on those raids already (not me), I really wish they would do something about some of the trash in Karazhan. Specifically, the trash leading up to the Curator. That stuff is bonkers. On the other hand, I haven't been to KZ since Tigole said trash in many zones had been nerfed a bit, so maybe it's better now?
April news from Blizzard: The Tinfoil Hat and more
Another April, another round of announcements from Blizzard. It's like Christmas, only more entertaining. Let's see what we have in our stocking, shall we?First off, we finally have a way to hide ourselves from the Armory, in the form of the epic Tinfoil Hat. Not only does it prevent the Armory from indexing your data, it also hides you from in-game inspection, keeps you out of /who, and features an on use effect preventing mind control. You might have to slum it a bit to gather the 99 tin bars, but the joy of farming the tears of trolls will surely make it up to you. It's also required to gain access to the WoW forums, much like the Drakefire Amulet for Onyxia's Lair.Secondly, we have a first look at Blizzard's next game! Set in the Warcraft universe we all know and love, Warcraft: Heroes of Azeroth lets us see the epic struggle in a whole new way. This prequel to WoW lets us command buildings and units from an all-new top-down perspective, taking control of four races (night elves, orcs, humans, and undead). It takes PvP and PvE to a greater scale -- we'll get to command whole armies at once! And tying into WoW's mechanics are powerful heroes, who gain experience and items to progress in potency; these include WoW greats like Thrall and Jaina Proudmore. All in all, should be a fun new look at this great story and setting.Finally, we have a new attunement chart, this time for the Black Temple. It seems to take you through every instance in Outland a few times, as well as the Molten Core, the world dragons, BWL, and Onyxia's Lair. I for one am glad that this doesn't follow the pattern of attunements to places like the Eye, which are simply too easy to get into. Can you say free epics? In all honesty, I would have expected Deadmines to be on this attunement path somewhere, but perhaps it'll be patched into it later. Finally, after turning in a few Badges of Justice (500) and Marks of Honor (100) and fending off an Illidari invasion for a moderate six hours, the Black Temple awaits. I reckon I'll be attuned within 24 hours of the patch; how about you guys?
Iomega announces Power Pro Desktop Hard Drive with 2TB of storage
If your current drives are just stuffed the the gills with 10 megapixel photos you never resized and episodes of Still Standing that you forgot to erase, Iomega's got a new RAID array that'll bulk up your storage by two terabytes and let you continue living your carefree, digital pack rat lifestyle. With four independent, lockable 500GB drives, though, you could just as easily shift the Power Pro Desktop Hard Drive into RAID 1 and make sure that your 1TB of never-used files are doubly secure; RAID status plus free space, fan speed, and temperature are all displayed on the built-in LED. Connectivity options are also plentiful here, with the PPDHD offering both the 400 and 800 flavors of Firewire and, of course, USB 2.0 as well. Mac and Windows compatible, this one will set you back $1,700 when it hits on April 10th.[Via Macworld]
Nihilum gets Vashj to 3%
Superstar guild Nihilum (H-Magtheridon-EU) has apparently gotten Lady Vashj, the final boss of Serpentshrine Cavern and Illidan fangirl extaordinaire, down to 3%. This means the world first kill is probably not far off. In the grand tradition of end bosses for large raids, this follows after a hotfix nerf to Vashj a week or so ago; Ragnaros, Nefarian, C'thun, and Kel'Thuzad (I think; not quite positive on KT) were all nerfed before they were first defeated.Being as how nobody's ever killed her before, we don't really know much of what she might drop (other than probably T5 tokens like the rest of SSC and the Eye). But we do know one item: the Fang of Vashj, a one-handed (i.e. not restricted to main or off-hand) dagger with the following stats: "92.8 DPS, 133-201 damage, 1.8 attack speed, increases attack power by 50 and increases dagger skill by 14." We know this item exists because it's listed in the official Bradygames strategy guide, although besides its name we have no actual confirmation that it will drop from Vashj. If those stats are accurate, it would be the highest DPS one-handed weapon in the game, aside from the epic weaponsmithing weapons (Blazefury, Dragonstrike, and Wicked Edge of the Plains).[via MMO-Champion]
MicroNet Platinum NAS 4.0 packs four 1TB SATA hard drives
Look out folks, as just one month after Buffalo cranked the NAS ante up to 3TB, we've got a new kid on the block holding down the mighty four-oh. MicroNet's Platinum NAS 4.0 indeed packs a whopping 4,000GB on just four SATA hard drives, and while the company didn't go out of its way to divulge exactly which units were stuffed within, we've all got our hunch. Regardless, this device also features 256MB of write-back / write-through error correcting cache memory, Windows / OS X / Linux compatibility, RAID 0/1/5 support, an Intel XScale 64-bit network storage processor, dual-channel gigabit Ethernet connectivity, a lightweight aluminum design, and it even consumes about "one-third less power" than similar alternatives. Cleverly, MicroNet only asserted that the 1TB edition would hit in Q2 for $879, but we're confident the flagship version will tack on quite a premium for all its capaciousness.[Via MacWorld]
Will you be revisiting the old instances?
In today's Around Azeroth, which featured a shot of the final room of the live wing of Stratholme, I mentioned the fact that there's no reason for new players to visit the place anymore -- they may only see it from screenshots! With quests in Outland waiting at level 58, there's no longer a compelling reason to visit the level 60 dungeons again and again for gear. You'll improve upon anything you find with your first quest rewards, so what's the point of running these dungeons? Won't they be left behind like Zul'Ferrak, Sunken Temple, Blackrock Depths, and other below-60 dungeons where it's often simply too difficult to find a group before you outlevel the content. It's not that these dungeons aren't fun, it's just that the trouble to find a group of players interested in running them -- when so many people are busy leveling towards whatever "end game" there is at the moment -- is often a pain.However reader (and blogger), Gitr proposes an alternate reason to revisit some dungeons: solo content! And we're not just talking about what you can solo at level 70. If we get ten levels an expansion, the next one will give us level 80, after that 90, and eventually 100. So perhaps we can't do these things now, but will we eventually be soloing Molten Core and Naxxramas just for the fun of it?
Magtheridon hotfixed
Hot on the heels of Gruul's hotfix, Magtheridon has been adjusted (read: nerfed) as well:The Magtheridon encounter has been rebalanced to be somewhat easier and should now better keep to proper raid progression.Reprorts have it that although Mags himself hits harder now, the adds have less HP (120k less, according to one poster). Magtheridon was significantly harder than Gruul, who he was in theory meant to be on par with; hopefully this, as well as the Grull fixes, help make beginning BC raiding a little easier. I mean, I'm all for having to work for your epics, but I think most of you will agree that the beginning of the new endgame was a little too much like a brick wall. I'm pretty far from fighting Mags myself. Apparently he has five adds, who as in most add-based fights represent a significant part of the difficulty of the encounter, so nerfing them should go a long ways. However, based on the run-down over at BossKillers, it still looks like a pretty involved fight. Come to think of it, doesn't Kel'idan the Breaker, who is positioned directly above Magtheridon in the Blood Furnace, have five adds himself? That fight's a cakewalk, of course, but the parallelism is interesting.
German police raiding CeBIT, wiping out infringing kiosks
Talk about a royal buzzkill. It seems like several demonstrators at CeBIT are having their parties cut way short by German officials, as local customs and police offers have "confiscated products from the stand of at least one exhibitor on suspicion the devices infringed on MPEG audio patents." Currently, the authorities wouldn't divulge exactly which companies are getting nailed for patent infringement, but they did insinuate that most of the products in question made issue with "a portfolio of patents" that primarily focused on "MP3 players, MPEG2-compliant set-top-boxes, DVB satellite receivers, PDAs, and computer sound boards." It was stated that Mele Digital Technology was "targeted" and could be facing the stiff arm of the law, and while we certainly feel for those affected by bogus patent filings, this certainly isn't the first time a company has been embarrassingly interrupted while plugging its product line at a major trade show. Note to vendors: it's probably not in your best interest to bring along products that contravene with an outstanding patent, capiche?
