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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Lessons from Trial of the Crusader/Grand Crusader
This week The Care and Feeding of Warriors talks about what the latest 10 and 25 man raid can teach you on its highest difficulty setting. Matthew Rossi has gotten his face pushed into the floor a lot this week. It's okay, he probably needed a touch of humbling.So yeah, turns out the plants inside the Crusader's Coliseum taste awful. Must be all those yeti, worms and magnataurs they let traipse around in there.This week, after our usual clear of Trial of the Crusader we got serious in TotGC, as Matt Low tells me is the proper acronym. After some bad experiences we got the Beasts down with minimal fuss, and Jaraxxus took us a night but eventually died. Faction Champions, on the other hand, just stomped on our heads over and over and over and over again. Eventually they went down, and we called it a night exhausted but glad to be done with the whole thing. Why do I mention this?Because one of the things I've come to realize is that I'd gotten soft, or more accurately, I've grown comfortable in a tunnel vision, spam my rotation and shut up world. Whether tanking or DPS, warriors are notable as a class with a purity of focus... pretty much everything we do is physical in nature, with the exception of a few bleeds thrown in... and yet, a pretty widely varied toolbox to pull out. With Icecrown on the horizon and patch 3.3 on the PTR, it seems like a good time to discuss warriors as a general tacklebox.
Breakfast Topic: I miss trash
Before you have me committed, I'll say right now that I was expecting to be thrilled with the lack of trash in the new Coliseum raids. Who wouldn't be? No more endless waves of, say, Death Knights or Spectres or that horrible two-pull on the way to killing Auriaya or what have you. And you know what? I don't miss that stuff. I don't miss any of the trash we've yet seen in Wrath of the Lich King.In fact, what the trashless boss gauntlet that is Trial of the Crusader/Grand Crusader has done for me is to show me that I've been missing trash, real trash, since after we moved out of Mount Hyjal, and even then it was in slow decline. No, I hate to admit it, but in a blazing moment of honest to Murgatroyd old fogeyism, I came to realize that what I miss was the brutal, punishing trash pulls in Blackwing Lair. Blackwing Spellbinders were harder to deal with than some of the bosses that followed them! You could wipe multiple times before you even had the room cleared enough to pull a drake!Yeah, it sounds ridiculous that I'm nostalgic for that. And to be honest, it's a nostalgia tinged with a certain amount of relief that I don't have to go clear it again any time soon (and if I did, well, I'm level 80 now). But what I miss, and what I feel like we've been moving away from since Hyjal (which may have taken trash pulls to a height so ridiculous that the pendulum had to swing back this way) is trash with personality. Trash that sets the story, that makes you really feel like you're actually raiding an ancient lair of evil. That being said, I'm glad TotC is trashless. Just please, let Icecrown bring back trash that counts.How about you? Never want to see it again? Looking forward to its return? Where do you stand on trash?
Arcane Brilliance: Making your Mage raid-worthy, part 1
Welcome to another Arcane Brilliance, the weekly Mage column that asks all the tough questions, and then Ice Blocks before the tough answers one-shot it. A little while after Wrath hit, Arcane Brilliance posted a column on how to gear your Mage up for Naxx. Several things have changed since then: Pretty much everything I wrote then is now wrong. You don't really gear for Naxx anymore. Naxx is now a place you go in order to gear up for other places. Trial of the Champion. Knowing these things, I thought an updated gearing column might be in order. So if you're raising a fledgling Mage, and level 80 is about to hit you like a truckload of Death Knights, and you're looking for the quickest way to turn green and blue into purple, look no farther. Well maybe a little farther. The column's not over yet.
Breakfast topic: Has Trial of the Grand Crusader been a reasonable challenge?
My raiding guild suffered from the Anub'Arak soft reset issue where we were unable to reach the floor where the oversized bug was. We wanted to clear him out on normal mode before we switched over to the harder difficulty. But since the floor was intact, we couldn't! (Note: This has since been fixed). Because of this, we decided to toggle on Heroic mode for Trial of the Crusader on 25 just to get a feel for it. Some guilds believe that the Coliseum, even on heroic, is too easy. So I went in wondering what the fuss was all about. I wanted to know how easy the heroic setting would be. But that's when I faced the reality check. Remember, not everyone is in a top 100 guild. We burned through about 10 attempts that night just working on the first encounter alone. That experience helped to ground us and we realized what we needed to do to get through that mountain. In the end, we weren't able to even get past Gormok. We came to the conclusion that we were definitely going to need to coordinate healing and tanking cooldowns to break past the final minute of the first boss. Nonetheless, it was fairly humbling. We'll have to go in next time much more carefully and with a more detailed game plan in mind. It's been several days since Trial of the Grand Crusader has been accessible. Do you feel it has just the right amount of challenge for your raid group? Have you found it too easy or too difficult?
We Have a Tabard: It's not cheating if...
Looking for a guild? Well, you can join ours! We have a tabard and everything! Check back for Amanda Dean talking about guilds and guild leadership in We Have a Tabard.As I've mentioned before I'm not totally against PUGging raids. I find its actually an excellent way to get to know people on the server and sometimes a handy recruiting tool. Depending on your guild rules, there are some raids to PUG and some raids to save your lockout for your guild.I had a guildie today all distraught because he was saved to Naxx 10 helping a guildie out. He apologized profusely when someone was putting together a "Badge Run Blitz" but couldn't heal it. At this point Naxx 10 is like running an extended heroic with more gold and shards. We've progressed beyond it, so lockouts are fair game.I get a wee bit crabbier when folks get locked out of our current progression. We're actually still working on Ulduar 10, and need to draw upon any available resources to move forward. Guildies can feel free to run Naxx, Vault, and Obsidian Sanctum to their heart's content. Usually when someone asks for my blessing to run with another group, I give it if they have to miss guild times or we're unable to get into the group.
"For the Horde" gets world-first A Tribute to Insanity-10
With the heroic versions of Trial of the Crusader going live yesterday, raiding guilds are already venturing into the more challenging versions of Tier 9. As of evening Tuesday EST, the European guild For the Horde has claimed a world-first A Tribute to Insanity-10 (a no-wipe full clear of the instance) on 10-man heroic Trial. Unfortunately, I don't speak German so I might be missing some of the finer points related on their website (anyone who can shed more light on this, please drop a comment!) but it looks like they weren't deliberately aiming for the achievement until they reached Anub'arak with all 50 attempts remaining, and then decided to go for it. Next in achievement progression? A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity -- repeating it without any gear from 25-man ToC, which is broadly equivalent to the Herald of the Titans achievement. Ouch.Boubouille at MMO Champion has since confirmed that the Swift Horde Wolf and its Alliance counterpart the Swift Alliance Steed are drops from the tribute chest upon completion of the no-wipe clear, and it's quite possible that the mounts also drop from the 25-man version as well. However, I doubt we'll be seeing A Tribute to Insanity-25 this week, as none of the guilds doing the heroic-25 mode have reported a wipe-free experience thus far.We'll keep an eye on guild progression for you, and congratulations to For the Horde!
Premonition gains A Tribute to Mad Skill achievement
Via GuildOx, we have another big raid achievement coming down the pipe for Premonition of the Senjin-US server, who probably needed a boost after that horrible wipe to Hogger at BlizzCon. They've just grabbed the 10-Man Tribute to Mad Skill achievement, which means they defeated the 10-man Coliseum raid on Hard Mode up through and including 10-man Anub'arak with less than 5 wipes over the entire time.Premonition has established itself among the solid lead US guilds before, having also been the first US guild to get Heroic: Alone in the Darkness by killing 25-man Yogg-Saron with no watchers. It looks like they're poised to continue that streak now that all the bosses in the Coliseum are unlocked. Congratulations to them, and good luck in the future!Update: We're attempting to verify this through other means at the moment. Hold onto your pants! -AlexUpdate #2: Confirmed.
The Queue: Exploits and dirty cheats
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.The video embedded in today's edition of The Queue isn't a silly music video this time around, I'm afraid. No funny business today. Today is for game faces. Today is for serious business. Today is for italic letters. Sashay asked... "I have found a glitch that has caused many people to have their hearts broken. This glitch is the "underground" mining technique that people use so they will not be attacked by enemies. Does this happen because they found a "Under Stormwind" glitch somewhere in Northrend? Maybe they put their toon in the tourney castle before it was built and now they are under everything?"
Crusader's Coliseum tribute rewards are ilvl 272
Patch 3.2 brought with it three new tiers of gear, corresponding to the various difficulty settings available for the Trial of the Crusader raid. The items coming out of the 25-man heroic version, at item level 258, are leaps and bounds above what was available in Ulduar -- and if you thought that those were pretty good, you're in for an even bigger surprise if you manage to complete the dungeon's tribute run. Boubouille, head of the Data Miners' Guild and captain of the starship MMO-Champion, pulled the full list of loot available in the raid from the official Armory site. Players who accomplish the feat of completing the full heroic 25-man dungeon without wiping once will receive a chest with one of several ilvl 272 cloaks in it. At ilvl 272, these cloaks are the best items in the game. Even ignoring their item level, they're extremely well-itemized, and offer something for even some oft-ignored specs ... even Elemental Shamans, thank God. And with the next-highest item level being 258, the cloaks are a full tier above the heroic 25-man's gear. To put that into perspective, moving from 10-man Ulduar to 25-man Ulduar is only a jump of 6 item levels. This also means that, if dungeon difficulties and item levels continue to progress in the same way they have been for the previous two content patches and no half-tier steps occur, we could be seeing the following approximate item levels in the Icecrown Citadel raid:Normal 10-Man: 258Heroic 10-Man/Normal 25-Man: 272Heroic 25-Man: 285, with probable level 298 super-rewards. Though Patch 3.3 is supposed to be WOTLK's last content patch, if it's not, we could see item levels bust 300 in this expansion. Crazy!
