raiding
Latest
Gruul's Lair tweaks
Gruul's Lair is the first 25-man raid many BC raiders may experience. My guild hasn't gotten a crack at it yet, since we can't seem to get 25 raiders together at a time, but I'm still hopeful. The raid is relatively short, consisting of two bosses (Gruul the Dragonkiller and High King Maulgar) plus relatively small amounts of trash. It doesn't require any attunement, drops (among other things) the T4 legs and shoulders, and is required for Serpentshrine Cavern attunement.Both bosses in the raid have had adjustments in the past couple of days. Gruul was using his Hurtful Strike ability on both the second and the third players on his aggro list; this was a bug introduced in 2.1 and has been hotfixed such that only the second player on the aggro list gets struck, as intended. Maulgar was slightly nerfed in 2.1 as an intended change; he now attacks faster, but for less damage at a time. His overall DPS should stay the same. This change ought to result in less spiky deaths, and will be "mostly noticed by under geared raids."
How to get attuned to the Black Temple [updated]
On the PTR, it was really easy to get attuned to the big new tier 6 raid, the Black Temple. All you had to do was be at least Honored with the Violet Eye and talk to Johnny McWeaksauce, and you'd get the amulet that served as a key. So it actually never occurred to me to wonder what the attunement process would be like in the live patch. In case you were wondering, however, wonder no more. MMO-Champion has all the details (plus screenshots), courtesy of Arthyn from Vanquish (A-Staghelm). In short, you have to kill Fathom-Lord Karathress (a boss in Serpentshrine Cavern) and Al'ar (a boss in the Eye). The detailed version is after the cut, for reasons of length and spoileriness.Update: apparently, Karathress and Al'ar are just the first parts of the attunement chain. After Al'ar, you have to kill Rage Winterchill, the first Hyjal boss, and even that may not be the end -- we'll just have to see. World of Raids has screenshots of the new quests.
Guildwatch: Trouble at the top
Guild drama is always pretty bad, but almost nothing is worse then guild drama that hits right where it hurts: at the top. When your guildleader gets a little out of shape, takes an extended break, /gdisbands, or even flips factions on you, you know it's going to be rough going ahead for your fellow guildies.Lots of stuff like that today-- here's this week's Guildwatch, right after the jump. To get your guild here (or let us know about something going down on your server) drop us a line at wowguildwatch@gmail.com and hook us up with drama, downed, or recruiting news. Follow your favorite raidleader past the link below to check the column.
Guildwatch: Stripped bare
Getting your toon stripped to his undies is bad enough, but what happens when your guildies do it to you? That's what happened in the picture above-- click the link below to read more in this week's Guildwatch.And don't forget, the only way we get all this drama, downing, and recruiting in one place is via your tips-- send them in ASAP to wowguildwatch@gmail.com. And if you don't, be careful. Your bags just may end up full of junk!
What is the ideal raid size?
Over at Elitist Jerks Quigon of Maraudor started a thread about raiding. In it he philosophizes about raiding as we knew it, and how things have changed since the expansion. Raids in the original WoW varied in size, but the main push was toward the 40-man grouping. We did it in MC, in Naxxramas, even with the world dragons. But with the large number of members the encounters were for the most part simplistic, since it takes a great deal of skill to coordinate a large number of people to do just about anything. As Quigon puts it, the feeling of an epic fight has diminished somehow, despite the new encounters being more challenging. There isn't the same amount of excitement as a boss drops, that tangible electricity over the Vent channel. Is this because the encounters still need some tune ups, or is it because of the smaller group? Do you get the same swelling of pride as you form up as a group of 25 heroes to wage war as you would if there were 40 of your brethren around you? On the other hand, what about the 72-man raids in Everquest? Since we have so many variations in spec, build and class these days, wouldn't more people in a raid be better than fewer? He raises a lot of stimulating questions, questions I'd love to hear your perspective on. What is the perfect raid size? Is it 10, 40, or 100? [via Elitist Jerks]
Officers' Quarters: Surviving Karazhan
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. Last week was an exciting week for me with the premier of my new column. I've had a week's worth of questions piling up, so let's look at one of them today. I was wondering what you guys do to address straight-up performance problems. We've been successfully raiding Karazhan for about a month now, but when we swap in other warriors/healers we always seem to have performance problems. We've had sit downs and group meetings. We've discussed things in open guild chat and privately with the ones we're having problems with. Just seems like nothing will effectively get through to them. I've never played WoW with a group of people that just don't seem to care about how well they do. They don't seem too interested in progressing their gear or play experience outside of Karazhan. They're not really breaking any guild rules, they're online during raid times, they try to participate, but I hate to decide on raid spots between a player who has rock solid attendance/performance versus a player with solid attendance but poor performance. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you in advance, Ty from Hellscream Thanks for writing, Ty. Kara is a zone that has created a lot of problems for guilds who are used to bringing 20 or 40 players on raid nights. Suddenly officers have been confronted with the reality of exactly what each player can contribute in a small but challenging raid. As we make judgments for who gets to go, who's on which team, and so on, friction is inevitable. Guilds have been undone by Karazhan -- don't let it happen to you!
What would it take for ret pallies to raid?
Retribution pallies have a pretty bad reputation among a lot of raiding guilds. They're widely believed to have inferior DPS and low utility. And even as feral druids, prot pallies and shadow priests have become accepted in non-healing roles, ret pallies have been left out in the cold. Megas of Hakkar is frustrated with this situation, and asks the forums: What class changes would it take for a ret pally to get a raid spot in your guild? A healing factor like shadow priests have? Some form of group mana regen? The group buffs of ret pallies include a small healing-received (DPS in the next patch) aura and a judgement that can increase crit chance on a target by 3 percent. Most of the respondees noted that they couldn't think of anything that would cause them to give a ret paladin a DPS raid slot. While there's no real hard numbers on ret paladin DPS, a lot of the raid leaders have had very bad experiences with pallies at the bottom of the DPS meters, and in the current bleeding-edge 25-mans, you can't really have inadequate DPS. There's a lot of talk about how to make ret viable in the paladin forums, but a lot of holy and prot pallies think ret is a lost cause, and it gets pretty heated in there. I don't personally have enough experience with ret pallies in a raid environment to judge their DPS. My own pally went prot at 45 and never looked back. But I do think that people who rolled pallies to DPS in PVE may want to rejudge their choice. Paladins are possibly the best single-target healing class in the game, and make respectable tanks for most instances and superior tanks for multiple mobs. One class can't be the best at everything, and in difficult raids, raid leaders are going to min/max to get the best DPSers/healers/tanks there are. I'm content for paladins to be tanking/healing hybrids. What do you think about ret pallies? Underutilized DPS resource, or waste of a raid spot?
Guildwatch: Well that's one way to do it
I'm so excited. Next week, finally, my guild is going to roll with a full 25-man group, and head into Gruul's Lair to try and take the big guy down. We haven't raided together in a full group in quite a long time (it's been 5mans and Karazhan, of course), so I can't wait to see some action like High King Maulgar here (this is Shadow Fate's kill, complete with extra adds-- see below).It's Tuesday, which means it's time once again for your weekly dose of guild drama, downings, and recruiting notices, brought to you by tipsters from all over the realm of Azeroth. If you've got a good tip (and we're sure you do), please send it away to wowguildwatch@gmail.com for next week's column. Meanwhile, hit the link below to read about this week's hot guild-on-guild action.
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?
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]
Nihilum meets Kael'thas, finds new Legendary
Nihilum has made it to see Kael'thas Sunstrider, the end boss in the 25-man raid The Eye (in Tempest Keep), and though they haven't downed him yet, they've come back to tell the tales.First things first, there's a new Legendary in the game, a two-hand axe called Devastation, with a +50 crit, +150 attack power, and a speed buff of 50% and an attack speed buff of 20% as a chance on hit. Oh, and did I mention that it's got 158.1 DPS on it? I think I just did. I believe that makes it the highest DPS weapon in the game? Nope, there is at least one wand that goes higher (thanks readers! see comments below). The only thing I know of that's higher is Illidan's Twin Blades of Azzinoth, and those have only been seen on GMs so far.There is a catch, however-- the axe can only be used during the fight with Kael'thas. As for the event itself, Nihilum says "the encounter seems very cool," and it looks like Kael comes with (at least) four adds-- his advisors Thaladred the Darkener, Master Engineer Telonicus, and Grand Astromancer Capernian and Lord Sanguinar.No mention yet on how they're doing with the encounter, but I'd guess we might see a world first as early as this weekend.[ via MMO-Champion ]
Why is the Horde suddenly so good at PVE?
Pre-Burning Crusade, it was widely acknowledged that in general, the Alliance was superior in PVE and the Horde was superior in PVP. Aside from a few outstanding Horde guilds like Elitist Jerks and Nihilum that regularly got world firsts, the top 10 kill list of new bosses were usually dominated by Alliance guilds. Horde members constantly complained on the forums that the developers favored Alliance -- paladins got raidwide buffs, dwarf priests got fear ward, etc. Alliance fired back the same thing about shamans and War Stomp in PVP. But finally, in Burning Crusade, the Horde got paladins, the Alliance got shamans, and no one could really complain about anything. So what happened? Well ... maybe the Horde did have something to complain about after all. Looking at WoWWiki's guild progression page, five Horde guilds and five Alliance guilds were in the top ten for killing Nightbane in Karazhan and Doom Lord Kazzak. But after that, things solidly shifted in favor of the Horde. Gruul: 6 out of 10 guilds are Horde. Magtheridon: 7 out of 10. Hydross the Unstable: 8 out of 10. The percentages shift, but Alliance has only caught up once, on Leotheras the Blind. So what happened? Was the previous Alliance domination only a myth? I can't find any records of the top ten boss kills in AQ40 and Naxx, but I recall that there were far more Alliance than Horde at the time. I also recall many, many threads arguing about what advantages paladins had. The Horde gets paladins and the Alliance gets shamans, so everyone's equal, right? Apparently not. What mystical force is pushing the Horde ahead? I asked a couple Horde stalwarts on my server, and they had some interesting ideas. Since the Hordeside is smaller than the Alliance on most servers, the Horde gets to know each other better as a community. We know who's good and who's bad, and guilds can recruit accordingly. And while the Horde who rerolled to paladins seemed to do it for PVE reasons -- "Hey, the guild needs a pally and I'd kind of like to heal for once" -- a lot of Alli shamans seem more PVP-focused. Or it could just be dumb luck that the Horde's ahead right now. Why do you think Horde guilds have jumped to the fore of PVE post-Burning Crusade? Or is the whole thing just coincidence?
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):
Deathwing lives! (Maybe!)
Never heard of Deathwing? Well, I suppose you can be forgiven -- he's not currently in the game. However, Deathwing (also known as Neltharion), the former leader of the Black Dragonflight plays a big part in Warcraft lore. Despite the fact that he's not currently to be found in Azeroth, there's a lot of speculation as to where Deathwing might be. Grim Batol, where he was last seen? Returned to his long-empty lair? Or perhaps he's truly dead? Well, new information coming from the public test realms suggest that Deathwing may be back. BlizzPlanet is reporting that in the Black Temple, the NPC Lady Sinestra has a dialog referring to "the master" -- presumably Deathwing. Still curious? Full text of the dialog after the jump.
"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!
Preview: Black Temple bosses
MMO-Champion is at it again (Boubouille has just been doing a bangup job showing off content from this 2.1 patch!), and this time, he's somehow delved into the Black Temple and pulled out screengrabs of (most of) the bosses. As of this writing, there's no Illidan grabs yet, but that may still be coming.Since we killed the site off the last time we linked to it, I've gone ahead and mirrored the Boss shots: Here's High Warlord Naj'entus (he's the Naga-looking thing we saw last time), Supremus, Teron Gorefiend (judge me by my size, do you?), Gurtogg Bloodboil (the best looking one, in my opinion), Mother Shahraz, and Essence of Souls (the last one appears to be an encounter of sorts, and it's probably where that three faced boss-- Desire, Grief, Anger-- appears).Boubouille has also grabbed a layout of the class trinkets available at the Exalted levels of the Ashtongue Deathsworn rep, so you can know right now what you're going to be working for. I have to admit that all the content looks sweet, but just like all really high level content, I wonder how many people are actually going to see it. The Black Temple seems fun, but to tell the truth, I'm actually looking forward to the Ogri'la and Sethekk quest areas more.
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:
Top guilds want Blizzard to take out the trash
There's been a low-level murmur for weeks in the Raids and Dungeons forum about the amount of trash in Serpentshrine Cavern. Words like "nightmare", "soul-destroying", and "worse than Twin Emps-C'thun trash" were bandied about. The problem wasn't just the amount of trash, but the respawn time -- with 45-minute respawns, guilds were literally watching trash respawn behind them as they cleared. And as more guilds check into early Tempest Keep, they're finding the same situation. This week, the wave finally crested, with members of Death and Taxes, Curse, and other top guilds arguing that the trash situation has become unbearable. Selected comments from the threads follow:
