May 2 News
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Bolty's back with a Priest Quiz this time. Maybe he'll work some up for some other classes...

I am often asked "Is being a hunter that hard? It's just ezmode levelling, autoshotlolAFK., right?" Well...yes and no. It's easy to be bad hunter. They are one of the, if not the most maligned class out there. If you hang around with good hunters, you'll hear them griping about having to weave shots, and how it hurts their dps if they don't/can't/aren't good at it. Here is a nice little article to help explain what it is they are trying to do. It's also a good read for any hunter, as any better grasp of our mechanics is a better thing.

Cameron Sorden comes up with a very nice article summarizing some of the issues involved with Guild Hopping. Why folks do it, what should be done about it. Should anything be done about it. There are some...unique suggestions (Any items acquired in a raid are removed from your toon on deguilding and putting it (or the gold equivalent, I imagine) in the Guild Bank. It's an interesting read, to be sure.

Is there anything to a BM hunter aside from not clipping those autoshots? Because I've been told several times by my guild's best hunter that he's just sitting there, tapping his Steady Shot + Kill Command macro all fight.

Yes and no. Due to "the macro" there is a lot of the work and skill taken out of a hunter. A BM hunter can "sit there and macro mash" all fight and still do very well. But you can still tell the ones who weave their shots manually, and know what they are doing. Even BM hunters benefit from shot weaving with a higher dps, but it's not part of "the macro" so most don't bother.

May 6th News
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M'uru is down.

The Stormrage Lurkers and Crew have put Vashj to rest.

Here is an interesting article on the various uses of a Paladin's Seals and Blessings.

A topic of a more personal nature that I've been getting a first hand education in, is that of Game/Time Management. Your boss is breathing down your neck, you are staying late at work. The kids want supper, your wife wants a night with you...and you have a raid in 10 minutes. It can get nuts. We've all heard stories or may even know those who have ruined careers due to this game. Those who have thrown away amazing GPA's or scholarships. How far do you go? How far can you go? Does your family remember you? Still have a girlfriend? Adjusted (or tried to) your work around your raiding/playing?

Pray to the Earth Mother that Kill Command doesn't stick Auto Shot.

...

My prayers are unanswered. Sniff.

That leaves way too much power in the hands of the guild master. I am not sure if it has occured to the author of the article that was quoted in that article that some people who leave their guilds actually contributed to guild progress, rather then received a free ride.

The way you can combat that, is typically a trial period. Let recruits get last dibs on anything that drops, for the first month they are in the guild. That way, the guild doesn't lose anything if they happen to leave after their second epic.

What if they leave three months in? Well, if you kept them around for three months, then they were either contributing to progression, or they were bad, but you really really needed the class they were playing.

Either way, without them, you wouldn't have been raiding.

At one point, when working on SSC/TK my guild was short a few players... So it merged with a different guild. Some of the new people were causing problems to no end. A few weeks later, they collectively /ragegquit in the middle of a raid, after their rogue was called out on raiding with a 400 dps shadowstep spec.

When they left, we lost a week's worth of loot, a pretty good healer, several mediocre DPS, and a whole lot of baggage. Did we need the gear they took? Yes.

Did it set us back a week in progression? No.

At this point, tier 5 can be cleared in a Kara and badge-geared raid. Good players are far more important then who has what gear, with the possible exception of the main tank (Who has to be geared, and good).

As for the article that you linked, the author skirts around, mentioning, but not focusing on a key aspect of WoW raids.

Loot isn't fair. The sooner people realise that, the less drama it will cause.

In my guild, we have a DKP system. There are three types of bids: 100% of item value, 50% of item value, and 25% of item value.

Speaking of fairness, in my guild, there are typically 4 hunters, an enhancement shaman, 3 rogues, and 2 feral druids competing for leather/mail upgrades.

In the meantime, we only have 1 prot warrior, who sometimes competes with our 1 prot paladin. Regardless of their DKP standing, any non-set item they want, they receieve as soon as it drops. They realise that, and while they could theoretically bid 25% on everything, they bid 100%, and very rarely, 50% (Doing otherwise would be an attack against the integrity of the system, and our GM (The prot warrior) has zero tolerance for it.

In the meantime, the rogues, hunters, shaman, and fury warrior fight over their loot tables. Viciously. Well, not so much the rogues, who aren't bidding on anything, as they are awaiting their Warglaives (which, if they keep at it, will probably be free rolled out among the melees).

(And DKP isn't the source of drama... A good system prevents it. My guild has tried doing free rolls, loot council, and DKP, and there have not been any issues since we've switched to the latter - even though we started over twice times on different servers.)

The part that was most interesting was the concepts exploring group motivation, which is what I find most lacking in most MMORPG's. So, a better job of guaranteeing a payoff for dedicated work is one good idea, that "armor tokens" seem to address. Of course, dropping that super hard boss for a pseudo item seems a bit abstract and reality breaking. Then again, having the reward always be loot is another myopia of these games. The ultimate reward is actually character improvement, and subsequent experiences in increasingly difficult encounters should improve your character on their own merits and not depend on loot to supply progression alone. Hence, the "I can't do X until Y drops for me." problem. I think it would be worthwhile for game designers to go back to traditional RPG's and add in more concepts that made those games playable for decades.

I believe it comes down to building a game more heavily based on experience really, and building in a system that allows characters to choose talents, skills and improvements based on experience, rather than depending on the PRNG and finding loot to do it. I mean examine your WOW characters and see how much of even your base attributes are derived from gear, rather than innate talent. Strip anyone of our characters of their gear and they are common house mums, and gardeners.

Blessing of Wisdom is the mana user counterpart to Blessing of Might? I don't think so. Kings > Wisdom for well geared Druids and Priests since the 2.4 mana regen change, especially since it gives stam too. Wisdom is a last option, only if there's a spare pally type thing. Kings should be top priority for healing priests and druids.

It's unfortunate that pallies buffing jobs are so complex. Priests have it a little rough with 3 castable (and stackable) buffs. But pallies have to keep track of so many options and everyone wants something different. Thank goodness for UI mods.

A new pally buff mod has helped us a lot, lately. ZOMGBuffs, despite the horrible name, has a vastly improved blessing manager window than what PallyPower offered, and actually works for assigning buffs for more than just paladins.

At a glance I can see who is missing fort, intellect, buffs from any paladin (even 10m versions assinged to other paladins), etc. It also supports templates and will auto-generate buff assignments for the paladins in a raid based on your pre-configured preferences (you tell it first priority on tank warriors is kings, followed by light, followed by might, and it assigns in that order until it runs out of paladins).

It will even figure out whether a warrior or other class is tank, dps, etc, based on their talent spec (and is generally right).

Downside is it has a few bugs that come up here and there, but the author is active and works through them quickly.

I don't know about you guys, but we find ourselves running between 3 and up to 5 paladins lately, so better buff management has been nice, hence my long sales pitch for the mod.

The fact that it also handles self-buffs and keeps my ret aura (or whichever aura I tell it to keep up) and righteous fury up for me is just a personal bonus for me, the tank that often forgets to put RF back up after a wipe (sigh).

Seeing as everyone can use Kings, I actually agree that BoW is the mana-equivalent of BoM.

You're right that Kings is better than Wisdom for well-geared druids and priests, but there are two other healing classes in the game, both of whom have the exact opposite priority. Mages are ambivalent but probably prefer Wisdom, Warlocks prefer Kings. Hunters as well, I imagine.

The priority list is different for each class/spec combination, and even depends on gear. Assuming that you bring three paladins (and why wouldn't you?), here's how I'd rank them:

Druids:
-Healing: Kings, Salvation, Wisdom
-Spell DPS: Salvation, Kings, Wisdom
-Phys DPS: Salvation, Kings, Might
-Tanking: Kings, Light, Might
Hunters: Kings, Wisdom, Salvation
Mages: Salvation, Wisdom, Kings
Paladins:
-Healing: Wisdom, Kings, Salvation
-Tanking: Wisdom, Kings, Sanctuary
-DPS: Salvation, Kings, Wisdom
Priests:
-Healing: Kings, Salvation, Wisdom
-DPS: Salvation, Kings, Wisdom
Shaman:
-Healing: Wisdom, Kings, Salvation
-Spell DPS: Salvation, Wisdom, Kings
-Phys DPS: Salvation, Kings, Wisdom
Warlocks: Salvation, Kings, Wisdom
Warriors:
-DPS: Salvation, Might, Kings
-Tanking: Kings, Light, Sanctuary

I'm guessing you don't play a hunter much. Since BoM gives you ranged AP now, assuming mana isn't an issue for that fight (and that depends on group set-up and raid set-up as well). The order is might, kings, wisdom, salv at least for me. Though if the raid has 10 physical DPS, my survival hunter actually has enough agi to make kings better now, not for me personally, but for the raid as a whole.

But as Conc said it gets even more fun with stuff like that too.

Salvation, Kings, Wisdom

Kings buffs both mana and health pools. A dead mage does zero DPS and it is easier for us to recover mana than heal ourselves effectively.

Not at all, no -- and I wasn't sure BoM did give RAP.

Lochnar, I don't exactly disagree, but I wouldn't prioritize the stamina boost that highly. Frankly, as a mage, I'd probably be mostly ambivalent about whether I got Kings or Wisdom -- I'd be more concerned about getting Salvation. The mana boost from Kings isn't that fantastic either; as soon as you're below maximum mana, it doesn't matter all that much.

MORDE!

START COLLECTING SHARDS ON TRASH!

Ha ha ha. Now that I think about it, maybe moving a distractable raid leader from a simple DPS spot to a prot pally tank wasn't the greatest move of all time =)

The priority is entirely per-encounter, and King is basically the choice just for the stamina boost. I agree that Kings has very minimal impact on most mages' mana pools/fight endurance. But don't underrate an extra 700-1000 hit points; I've had to be healed up from less than that before.

Our hunters want Kings, Wisdom, Might... Then again, they are hitting 1400-1800 dps, so that shifts might a bit off the table.

Of course, none of them are willing to sacrifice Might or Wisdom for Salvation - even after they pull Gorefiend off the tank because, uh, Feign Death bugged on them. Yay for wipes at 1% .

Speaking as a healer in T6 instances, I think some DPSers have a supreme under-estimation on the value of Stamina / HP.

I personally raid under the "10k buffed or bust" rule... as a priest... one of the lowest natural HP classes. With the mana regen change, I'm considering bumping it up to 11k through stam gems instead of regen gems. The benefit of some stamina margin is HUGE in my book. It does, of course, need to be evaluated on an encounter-by-encounter basis, but my personal valuation of stamina has dramatically increased as I experience things from the healing side. 500 health can make a very large difference.

Most classes mana options have been dramatically buffed over the abilities as they were when the content was designed. I honestly feel that in most cases Kings > wisdom for anyone under 10k health.

Yeah the equation shifts some. But might is 220 or 242 RAP depending on if it is improved or not. 1 agi = 1 AP and 0.552 crit. So generally you need to be running about 1K agility for kings to give you more bang for the buck on pure damage. Since that gets you 100 AP and about 5% more crit. Depending on gear it's 300 - 700 more mana, which is a couple more shots before running dry so it helps there as well. But then again it matters if wisdom is being judged, if you have an SP or not, etc. But yeah, like I said I'm even shifting to kings (though I'm survival) and I don't have a single piece of T5 on my hunter yet.

Our Survival hunter is above 1K Agi, but not our BM ones.

Even with 800 AGI, or less, the crit bonus results in a lot of damage - and more procs of Go For The Eyes.

Throat, maybe? It's Guild Wars with the Minsc reference, not WoW

Yep, dead = 0 dps. Other small benefits are an extra half percent or so of spell crit from the int boost and a small addition to mana regen from the spirit bump. Even salv isn't always the priority, but for an overall preference for the majority of encounters, the preferred order is Salvation, Kings, Wisdom for myself and, from what I hear, the mages I raid with.

I fight for increased stamina levels in our raids as well. Even early Tier 6 encounters are greatly simplified by stamina, except for pure burn fights with no incidental damage done to the raid to speak of (Kaz'rogal).

I love that some of our mages churn out 1500-1550 DPS regularly, but that overall DPS drops significantly when they die early and end up with 50% DPS time in WWS instead of 100% =)

<cough>Higler<cough>?

I can't believe you'd equate high DPS and low survivability with Higler. Whatever could you be thinking of?

I think he had it confused with Tris. I don't know if Tris ever raided with Higler, but he sure seems to follow the Higler method.

Maybe they should follow the Taha method of high DPS and high health...

They play mages a class that isn't currently overpowered and hasn't been overpowered the whole time the game has been out like a warlock.

I see you don't remember the time before 1.6...

No I do. They were still overpowered then and we had that argument back then too. I've always felt locks were overpowered.

May 9 News
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There is some amazing news on the next expansion coming out of a Gamespy article with some of the developers. Some of the highlights?

The Death Knight explained.

In a move that is already creating debate and controversy...Raiding will be undergoing some big changes. There will be no attunements to any 10/25 man raid in WotLK, and any 25man raid will have a 10 man version. This is HUGE news, and seen by many as a 'step in the right direction'. Others feel that Blizz is way off base here. Time will tell.

There are also a few more tidbits that have come out.

10-man and 25-man versions of every raid dungeon, and the 10-man version's raid lock won't interfere/overlap with the 25-man version.

I forsee a lot of agonizing among raid leaders over what to hit first and how often =)

Hopefully the 10-man versions will be easy enough compared to the 25-man version that you can focus scheduled raids on the 25-man lock and folks can just guild-PUG the 10-man version on off-nights.

EDIT- I also read that the tiered sets dropping in a 10-man version will use the same art/textures as the 25-man version, but with different coloring (similar to current arena gear). More importantly, much like multiple seasons of arena gear, the 10 man set pieces will mingle with the 25-man set pieces for purposes of aquiring the 2 and 4 piece set bonuses.

So you can pick up 10-man set pieces to compliment the 25-man pieces you've aquired and obtain those set bonuses earlier, perhaps.

Huge fan of the WotLK raiding change and looking forward to it. I think it caters nicely to guilds like ours where we struggle to just barely hit 25 signups on a good raid night. We can still push content and see what the "end-game" has to offer, and hit up the 25-man version when we have the folks to do so.

Yeah, it's almost enough to make me want to raid again.

Huge fan here as well. Sure, it won't be the "big leagues", but just the opportunity to see Arthas is tantalizing.

Of course, apparently it's still not going to be easy. Time will tell how it goes.

Woohoo! I'll actually get to see the whole story!

Pretty excited about WOTLK now. That's a HUGE step. With AOC going the other way it looks like I'll be staying with WOW for a long time to come.

Yes, 10 and 25 being more or less equal makes me happy. The 25-man people get loot a tier higher to make them feel special so they don't gripe too much, while we can still see the content in smaller guild groups. I like it.

Yeah, I like it. You do have to deal with more organization crap and potential drama to get a 25 man going. I like that you get rewarded more for that.

The other thing that I hope this means is less nerfing. Fixing bugs, small reblancing if something is way out of line etc is fine. But continually dumbing everything down just so more people can see it shouldn't be needed. They can 'see' it a lot easier in the 10 man size so you don't have to nerf the 25, just fix it so it is balanced how you want. What that means is that for the crazy people like a lot of Lurkers on Terenas that when we have the time to get around to it, we can actually still see it pre nerf and get that same damn rush as everyone else who can raid 5 nights a week to our 2 when we beat it. It won't be, yeah, well we got it, but it's not the same encounter anymore, whoopee that I feel sometimes. Some content I got to see pre nerf some I didn't. But know Blizzard doesn't have to nerf it just so people can see it. Skilled players with less time can potentially benefit from this as well.

May 13 News
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As mentioned earlier, it looks very much like Patch 2.4.2 is going to drop today. Those are the most up to date notes from the PTR

Blizzard has also announced BlizzCon 2008. There look to be a lot of contests this year, as well as a silent auction.

More Wrath tidbits continue to surface. Things such as mounts that can carry passengers, the Trainers and AH crew staying put and not venturing into the new lands (again), and in another bit sure to stir things up, it seems the devs felt that they didn't reward PvE enough in TBC, (as the focus was heavily on PvP) and will look at adjusting that in WotLK.

Tigole drops a few bombs by announcing that the Zul'Aman Bear Mount will not be available after WotLK hits. They want to maintain the prestige of having done the zone "at an appropriate level". They are also looking at changing some of the titles, such as "Hand of A'Dal" and "Champion of the Naaru".

In a "Rust Storm" style move, Blizzard has taken action against Arena Teams that practiced Win-Trading. Several folks received 72 hour or even permanent bans, while every one caught had their Arena gear stripped off and their Arena Points total reset. Why folks think that they'll get away with cheating is beyond me anyhow, but it's nice to see Blizz crack down on this, as it was making Arena irritating for those not doing it.

This is great. The thread linked at the top of that article is a real win as well.

Here's a great quote from someone trying to justify their win-trading by using the "but someone else did it while they were using my account" defense:


Brilliant!

This sounds like a great change, but the context makes it clear that Kaplan was discussing the vehicle engine's capabilities and not a specific LK feature:



Sounds like they're pretty open to implementing that feature, but as a proud member of The Lounge, it's my sworn duty to pick whatever nits are pickable.

Edit: Here's a link to a transcript of the Kaplan interview: http://www.worldofwar.net/articles/413362/...ranscript/page1

Yeah the PvP forum and Customer Service forums have some real winner stories.

My favorites

- "But the win trading happened after I sold the team" (uhh... after you what?)
This excuse seems to be extremely common. It's kinda funny.


- "I win traded with my alt on this other server, but never win traded with my main on this server, you wrongfully took gear from both my toons"

AHAHAHAHAHA

And the default chat windows actually retain their settings between logins! Hooray! Now they just need to fix it so I can have combat logs in more than one window.

Thank you, Blizzard, for doing this 7 months too late to help me in Season 2 as I watched cheating run rampant in the last 2 weeks.

Oh well.

-Bolty

Those alleged win traders probably shouldn't use account sharing as an excuse. Blizzard tends to punish that harder.

One of our rogues got the Warglaive MH from Illidan then had his account banned a week later. He had given his account details to a friend a while back, and the friend have moved to Taiwan. Unknown to our rogue (who plays on an Oceanic server), his friend was levelling up a character on a US server. Account got permanently banned. Fortunately we did have another Warglaive MH drop a couple of weeks later.

In other developments, M'uru got a nerf in the patch, with the "Negative Energy" attack no longer causing spell pushback.

In regards to Gnollguy's comments about "nerfing of encounters" - I think almost every boss encounter nerf you could name was aimed at balancing the encounter to be more in line with its intended difficulty in progression. Magtheridon, Kael'Thas and Vashj are all examples of encounters where the initial difficulty was completely out of line with everything before them (and many encounters after). Vashj 1.0 (where she would randomly mind control 5 people for something like a minute during phase 3) was apparently a nightmare, and I think Method might have been the only guild to kill her more than once before the mind control was removed. In other words I don't think Blizzard would nerf encounters if they felt they were tuned appropriately to their intended level of difficulty in the first place.

The removal of attunements is a slightly different beast, and it seems like we've reached the point where guilds only halfway through SSC and TK are killing Rage Winterchill.

The only people who liked attunements were those who got an epeen thrill from being in a zone that "nubs aren't allowed to go in to." They were silly from the start, and I think Blizzard has finally learned. We'll see in the expansion.

You handle attunements via hard boss encounters that prove whether or not your guild is ready. Like Razorgore in BWL, and now Kalecgos in Sunwell. Blizzard's mistake with Hyjal was that the early bosses were so much easier than Vashj and Kael'thas that they almost had to lock people out for a while to stop them from trying to run four raid instances in a single lock. But that's a whole separate issue regarding raid release schedules that's also been beaten to death on other boards like EJ.

Then again, the trash in Sunwell drops a number of best-in-slot items for different classes, along with epic gems and sunmotes, that's it worth farming by even ssc/tk guilds. So, I dunno what Blizzard's doing. :(

-Bolty

This was demonstrated clearly in the thread. Someone says they were initially given a 72 hour suspension + removal of all season 3 gear from their toon.

They called Blizzard and used the "but someone else was using my account when the win-trading happened" excuse. Perma-ban. Grats!

With the exception of Mag, I agree. The current incarnation of Mag is just a total joke. If he is to be anything more then just a vending machine, the mind exhaustion needs to go back to the point where you need 2 teams of clickers.

The reduction of HP for Kael's weapons/advisors I think was a pretty big nerf too. The encounter was very doable without it, and I think losing the part of the strat where you say "we probably can't get all the weapons, which ones are we going to leave up, why, and what are we going to do about it" was a mistake.

That said, most of the "nerfs" in the game are just more gear being available over time. Well itemized blues from DM replacing pretty crappy ones from strath/scholo nerfed MC was the first big one, and now T6 badge gear and the welfare epics at the start of BT/MH are nerfing Kael even farther.

He's only a joke because he's tanked by 16K health, unbuffed main tanks in PUGs (Made possible by ZA and badge gear).

Try doing him with a full raid of kara-geared players, without access to badge loot, and you'll be spending quite a few nights on the fight. For one thing, you won't be getting all 5 channellers down before he releases.

For another, your main tank will keep getting 1-shotted by 13K cleave + attack spikes.

Right now, if he still required the two teams of clickers, he'd still be a joke, because of the factors I've outlined. I've ran PUG raids several times on him... And never had a problem with clicking. Never even had to switch people around. Requiring 2 teams, instead of one to click doesn't seem like at all a stretch.

And looking back to last year, when my guild was struggling on him, we weren't struggling because of the clicking - we were struggling because of lack of DPS, healing, and well-geared tanks.

The thing with Mag was that, when you still need gear off him, he is a very tough fight - you need solid DPS, healers, and a beast of a tank. However, once you meet those requirements, you are far better off heading straight into SSC/TK, instead of trying to farm him for a pretty terrible drop table. The epic gem bag changed that... Just like the badge gear simplified the fight.



The answer to it was, inevitably, the axe. Not like your fourth tank has anything to do once Phase 3 hits.

Although, to be fair, these days, a T5/Badge geared guild should have no problem at all with getting him into phase 3 with all the weapons dead (Even if it takes them ~6 attempts to do a repeat kill). What it means is that the fight doesn't get interesting until Phase 3 (Where, I do believe that advisor health was not reduced).



Indeed.

Yeah, advisor health was reduced in phase 1, which isn't a nerf, it just makes the fight mildly less annoying. Kind of like life would be better if A'lar had less health in phase 1...damn that's a boring fight until phase 2.