yogg-saron
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Fan-made Cuddle me Yoggy
Greyseer of Lorecrafted posted this cute little version (that site there is slow, but don't worry, we've mirrored all the pictures for you to browse through below, so don't take bandwidth from there if you don't have to) of the Old God of Death the other day, and he's just about as adorable as an ancient, malevolent deity can get. For some reason, Blizzard's new big bad has captured the fascination of their fans, and Greyseer has chosen a cloth-based representation of the fearsome creature.He says he only had the patience to make about five maw/eyes, and the fabric he used for Yoggy's belly has hearts on it, but we think that just adds to the charm. His little flipper/tentacle hands are great, too, and Greyseer calls the plush a "prototype," so maybe more are on the way. We're constantly amazed at what you players can do with some fabric and thread -- keep these plushy bad guys coming!%Gallery-63313%
Phat Loot Phriday: Soulscribe
Hey hey, now we're talking. Here's our first Ulduar item, and it is an excellent caster dagger.Name: Soulscribe (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDB)Type: Epic Unique Main-hand DaggerDamage/Speed: 88-283 / 1.80 (103.3 DPS)Attributes: +54 Stamina, +49 Intellect. These stats and the name point to Warlocks as the main users of this dagger, but really, given the rest of the stats, almost any caster could get some good use out of this thing. The main thing it's missing is Spirit, so if you count on that, you might want to look elsewhere, but this is Ulduar gear: chances are it's an upgrade no matter who you are. %Gallery-33600%
The Queue: Cats rule, dogs drool
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Today's edition of The Queue will be pretty short and sweet. Many of the questions that were asked yesterday have since been answered in other places around the site, so I just went ahead and skimmed over those ones to answer what hasn't been addressed already. Ready? Set? Let's go!Becky asked..."I may be wrong but it seems to me of all the in-game non-combat pets, there are no dogs but plenty of cats. What's with the lack of dogs? My mage wants a puppy."
How to activate Ulduar's hard modes
You may have heard that a number of guilds have cleared Ulduar to Yogg-Saron already, which to me is perfectly fine. I like to think that a lot of good, properly-coordinated guilds will kill Yoggy this week, and the Blues agree with me. Of course, this week's Yoggy kills were on the easiest possible difficulty, so world first or not, it doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of fame and fortune.This is the beauty of Ulduar -- if you want prestige (and the best gear), you have to earn it by flexing your raiding muscle and beating encounters on their respective hard modes. If you don't have the chops or the time for the highest difficulty content, then you can still beat the instance and see every encounter.But, of course, you want those 239-level items.So you should probably read after the jump and find out how to activate each boss' hard mode, yeah?
The best loot comes from hard modes, not just Yogg-Saron
Yesterday, Ensidia earned the world-first Yogg-Saron kill. This is not the world-first Ulduar clear, because Algalon is designed to be the hardest boss in there, but that's a story for another post. What I want to talk about here is loot. Specifically, I want to talk about the quality of Yoggy's goods, which is the same as the quality of every other drop in normal-mode Ulduar-25: ilvl 226 for armor, and ilvl 232 for weapons. The same pattern holds on 10-man, with Yogg-10's drops being ilvl 219, like the rest of Uld-10. This is a departure from previous tradition, where the last boss of a raid would drop items of higher caliber. Kel'Thuzad, for instance, drops items a full tier above the rest of Naxx (ilvl 213 vs. 200 on 10-man, ilvl 226 vs 213 on 25-man).
Vodka gets North American first Yogg-Saron kill
We're getting reports in of Vodka scoring the first Yogg-Saron kill on North American realms. Vodka had been one of the top guilds in the US throughout Tier 7 raiding, and are quickly solidifying their position at #1 (#2 in the world.) That leaves Algalon as the final boss left to down in Ulduar, along with almost all of the hard modes. Yogg-Saron isn't the end of the race, not nearly. Ensidia and Vodka have a lot more work ahead of them to win this thing. The loot consisted of... Garona's Guise Chestguard of the Fallen God Mantle of the Wayward Vanquisher Mantle of the Wayward Protector A Fragment of Val'anyr I cropped the screenshot above which was submitted to me via an anonymous tipster to hide any glimpse of Yogg-Saron, so we don't spoil the show for those who care about that sort of thing. If you want to see the full screenshot, you can see the full version here, which also contains the tooltips for all of the items I wasn't able to link above.Congratulations to Vodka, and good luck getting to Algalon!Update: Those reports are definitely confirmed, Vodka's guild website has additional screenshots.Update #2: Premonition wasn't far behind.
Ensidia downs Yogg-Saron
It was inevitable that someone would down Yogg-Saron pretty quickly, and less than twenty four hours after the patch went live European guild Ensidia have claimed World First on the Death God. Given the non-linear progression into Ulduar, a lot of other guilds were able to pull off world firsts on other bosses. It also seems that Ensidia was focusing on clearing Ulduar in normal mode, as none of their kills were done on hard mode. This means we're unlikely to see Algalon downed this week (not by Ensidia, anyway). While it came as no surprise that someone killed him, what surprised me was that it was Ensidia. I was betting on Vodka (can I get a 'for the Alliance!' from anyone?) and that they managed to do it while many of the EU realms were having stability issues. Of course, it should be noted that Ensidia was the same guild that cleared all Wrath content three days after its release (they hadn't decided on a name yet).Boubouille over at MMO Champion has a full raid list and info on some of the loot that dropped, including a rather nice cloak and a piece of that legendary healer mace.
Everything you wanted to know about World of Warcraft: The Secrets of Ulduar but were afraid to ask
This morning the World of Warcraft is eeriely silent as the latest mini-expansion The Secrets of Ulduar (aka Patch 3.1) goes live across US and Oceanic servers (with Europe to follow tomorrow). In a few short hours the servers will reopen, along with the doors to Ulduar, the newest dungeon, but if you're not au fait with the ways of Azeroth all this information is likely to leave you a little purplexed but fret not as we've put together a little guide to what you need to know about the latest patch.
Ask a Lore Nerd: Life and Death
Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer it in a future edition. Today we're fielding a lot of questions on the Light and the Shadow, and Life and Death. I don't know why, really, that's just how things happened! Trends like that are always fun, like the week or two where we had nothing but dragon questions. It makes picking out themes really easy!Emorich asked... I was under the impression that C'Thun wasn't dead. I thought we simply stopped him. After all, we were attacking one of his eyeballs, hardly a vital organ. Is Kil'Jaeden dead too? I thought we basically just pushed him back through the portal and now he's really pissed.
The Queue: Eight
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.In yesterday's edition of The Queue, my partner in crime Adam Holisky did some speculation about Battlestar Galactica that was taken as a huge, massive spoiler. As far as I know, it wasn't actually a spoiler. I'm here to fix that. I'm here to give you a real, true spoiler. Are you ready for it?They shoot Old Yeller.hold up asked...Is the Realm First Ulduar Achievement based on completing Ulduar on Easy Mode or is it based on clearing the entire place including the optional Algalon "the Raid Destroyer"?
Ask a Lore Nerd: It's the end of the world as we know it
Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.Good morning, everyone! My apologies for missing last week's Ask a Lore Nerd, I am apparently very, very bad at time management and I lost track of things while trying to finish furnishing my apartment. We're back in action this week though, so it's all good!Before we get started, I also wanted to remind people that Tokyopop is letting us read Warcraft: Legends for free until the 17th. I know Daniel mentioned it already this morning, but seeing as this is the lore column of the day, I just wanted to mention it again. Just imagine me as the hammer trying to drive this nail into your head. You can read it for free. And now we get the show on the road!naixdra asked...Why do the Orcs call Draenor, Draenor? Didn't the Draenei show up out of nowhere and call it that, so why would the native Orcs adopt the name given to it by outsiders (and still refer to it after their attempted annihilation of said outsiders)?
Ulduar on the Patch 3.1 PTR: The Flame Leviathan
The developers sent us for a bit of a loop today, putting an Ulduar boss up for testing with very little notice immediately after PTR maintenance. Matticus, ever reliable, threw together a quick 10-man raid and welcomed me along to try out the Flame Leviathan. Unfortunately, Michael Sacco (who walked you through Hodir and the Iron Council) wasn't able to go with us this time around. I think he did it on purpose so I couldn't make any jokes about his inability to perform, if you know what I mean.The Flame Leviathan is the boss (or one of the bosses) that uses siege vehicles in its encounter in the outdoors portion of Ulduar. For the safety of those that do not wish to be spoiled on anything Ulduar related, I'll put all information on the encounter beneath the cut below.Again, if you do not want to be spoiled, do not click the link below.
Yogg-Saron, Old God of Death speculation
One of the things that caught my eye in the Ulduar preview that was posted awhile ago is the description of Yogg-Saron. The flavor text describes him as 'the Old God of death.' Considering our big target in this expansion, the Lich King, that's extremely interesting.Wrath of the Lich King has heavily hinted at some sort of connection between Yogg-Saron and the Scourge, though we never quite find out what it is. The Scourge make heavy use of Saronite, an ore with Yogg-Saron himself as its origin. When the Alliance investigates this ore in the Dragonblight, they discover the Scourge says Yogg-Saron's name with some degree of hate and contempt.A lot of people fear there's a "puppet of the master" thing surrounding the Lich King, that he's not actually his own power, he belongs to Yogg-Saron. I find this unlikely for one really big reason: The Scourge hates Yogg-Saron, and everybody else that we've run into that have fallen under Yogg-Saron's will either love him utterly or serve him faithfully. If you go to the Saronite Mines in Icecrown and do the quest Slaves to Saronite, you see just how faithful some of his servants become once they've been controlled. If Yogg-Saron were controlling the Lich King, we'd see a very different Scourge.
PTR quests show hard-mode progression, Ulduar storyline, Val'anyr
We've been wondering for a while how exactly the Ulduar storyline plays out in 3.1; this may seem a bit silly or lorelol, given how much time is going to be spent running the instance itself or its myriad of raid bosses and hard modes, but I like to know what's driving me to complete an instance beyond phatty purpz.You can obviously infer a lot from the instance itself and the names of each respective room, but for those seeking a little more information, Wowhead's PTR page has you covered. There were a few quests added in this most recent PTR build that give us tantalizing bits of Ulduar storyline and show Blizzard's intention to create clear progressions -- not only in the 10- and 25-man versions of Ulduar, but a reward and progression path for those blazing a trail in the hard mode versions of each instance. A fine notion indeed. Oh, and if you wanted to know just how to forge that new legendary mace... This writeup will be spoiler-heavy! If you don't wish to know anything about the secrets that lie within Ulduar, don't click the link below. You've been warned.
Datamined Ulduar boss information, with analysis
Yes, yes, we know you're curious about what the Ulduar boss encounters will be like, loyal readers. With 14 bosses, 11 hard modes, and an optional heroic boss, we wonder, too! We'll be able to test some of these encounters on the 3.1 PTR soon, but there are, of course, those of us who just can't wait to know anything about what's going on in Ulduar. Luckily, ever-resourceful players and dataminers have acquired information about spells and abilities related to bosses in Ulduar from the 3.1 PTR files. There's a lot of of stuff in here -- some of it may make it into the live game, some may not, and some may be related to vehicles or other sundries involved with encounters. I'm going to go into detailed analysis of those encounters for which detailed spells exist. It goes without saying that these will be huge spoilers to anyone who doesn't want their Ulduar experience to be anything but pure, so don't read past the jump if you don't want to know!
Sneak peek at World of Warcraft comic issue 16
The official WoW website has put up a preview for issue 16 of the World of Warcraft comic. I have to say, this one doesn't look nearly as facepalm inducing as the last few. In fact, aside from a few art oddities (did Valeera just trip up there?), it looks like a pretty good start for this arc.It looks like this arc is not only focused on Garona's half human, quarter orc, quarter draenei son, but a few other things, too. It looks like this arc will focus somewhat on Fandral Staghelm and the state of Teldrassil, what's happened to Ahn'qiraj since we were there last and potentially the relationship between King Varian and Valeera. To avoid spoilers, I'll stick a few more things behind the cut below.
WoW EU previews Ulduar
We've been waiting not-very-patiently for news on Ulduar and patch 3.1, and the WoW EU website certainly delivered today. A preview for Ulduar has been posted, with some descriptions of the early raid encounters and a little more lore flavor for the zone itself. The very beginning of the preview gives a little setup for the zone: "Some thought it a city, built to herald the glory of its makers; some thought it a vault containing innumerable treasures, perhaps even relics of the mighty Titans themselves. They were wrong. Beyond its gates lies no city, no treasure vault, no final answer to the Titan's mysteries. All that awaits those who dare set foot in Ulduar is a horror even the Titans could not, would not destroy, an evil they merely... contained."Awesome? I would say so. The preview also drives the point home that Blizzard is really loving the hard mode options of encounters. 11 out of 14 encounters will have a hard mode (or modes), so your raid can determine what they can handle. I don't want to get too excited about the preview, I'd like to see the zone in person before I get giddy, but it does sound damn cool and the pictures they supply are very pretty. Go forth and devour their bandwidth, my friends.Need more news about Ulduar? We've got updates, previews, speculation, and everything else you need to know about the next big raid coming in patch 3.1. If the Titans are hiding it up there, we'll tell you about it here.
Who's the boss (in Ulduar)?
All this talk of 3.1 we've been seeing lately is fantastic! Class and talent changes everywhere, dual-spec announcements (see? I told you!), it's all great stuff. For me, though, the big draw of 3.1 is -- read my lips -- one new dungeon! I know, I know, raids is raids, but I'm getting pretty tired of Naxx, and I want a nice long raid to sink my teeth into. New strats to learn! Setting a course through uncharted territory! Wiping because we don't know the fight yet! I'm just so excited. Of course, the one thing we haven't found out about Ulduar yet is who the heck we're killing for their purples! Being a reasonable man who reads his quest text, though, I've been able to divine the identities of a few personalities we're likely to encounter. The Ulduar screenshots from beta, with their diverse wings and amazing architecture, also hint to these same folks. They'll be involved, and I'll put good gold on it. Who's ready to rumble?
The Ice Stone has melted!
When The Love is in the Air started up this morning, a really curious bug cropped up that has even some Blizzard employees stumped. Every now and then, a server-wide emote (like the one you see when Eranikus is defeated in Moonglade) announces to the world that, 'The Ice Stone has melted!'Nobody really knows what it is, or why it's announcing that. As I mentioned, even a few Blizzard employees have no idea what it is, though they're looking into it. The only 'ice stone' that crops up when Googling or Wowwiki'ing around to find this thing is the objects from the Midsummer Festival that we interacted with last year. It's possible that the team responsible for world events was working on an update to the Midsummer Fire Festival and crossed some wires somewhere. After all, if any of the holidays need an urgent update, it would be that one.
Phat Loot Phriday: Titansteel Shield Wall
This is one of the more legendary shields in the game at this point, even if it isn't actually Legendary. But it is for all you Blacksmiths out there looking for something to do.Name: Titansteel Shield Wall (Wowhead, Thottbot, Wowdigger)Type: Epic ShieldArmor: 7350Abilities: 211 Block, +36 Strength, +69 Stamina Increases defense rating by 64, and at this level, while I'm not a tank expert (I leave that to the pros), Defense is what you want. %Gallery-33600%
