Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Breakfast topics, Instances, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King

Some instances and raids, you understand why you’re there. Icecrown, for instance, makes a lot of sense to me. I get why we’re running the five mans (trying to sneak into the Citadel while the Scourge is focused on the front door) and the raid (that didn’t work out so hot so brute force it is!) I always enjoyed Scarlet Monastery and had no difficulty with why I was running the place either as Alliance or Horde. Alliance, you were cleaning out a nasty pack of gibbering mouth-breather sociopathic xenophobes who were totally freaking insane, and Horde… same deal, plus they were killing people you actually knew.

Continue reading Breakfast Topic: We’re doing what now?

Breakfast Topic: We’re doing what now? originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Breakfast topics, Instances, Wrath of the Lich King

But man oh man, am I tired of Halls of Stone. Ridiculously, completely, utterly sick of the place. When I see the HoS loading screen pop up (and by now I’m as familiar with that screen as I am with my own apartment) I actually feel my whole body shudder with faint disgust and slight loathing. Ah man, not this place again! And always, someone’s going to insist we do every single boss instead of skipping Maiden and Krystallus so I’ll be in here even longer. Since I try to only drop groups when I find it absolutely necessary as part of the whole ‘I’m tanking so I’m responsible’ ideal I have, I find being stuck in HoS over and over again to be my own personal purgatory.

So how about you? Have an instance you dread seeing yet again? Or have you been mercifully spared Violet Hold threepeating in one day? (Seriously, VH, followed by VH, followed by Nexus, followed by VH? That was just cruel, dungeon finder.) Is this just the price I pay for getting nearly instant runs? I suppose it’s not so bad in that case. (Oh, who am I kidding, go away Halls of Stone, I don’t want to talk to you no more.)

Breakfast Topic: Not This Again originally appeared on WoW.com on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Wrath of the Lich King, The Queue

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. Allison Robert will be your host today.

Alex is popping out for a RL issue, so I’m afraid, dear readers, that you’re going to get stuck with the writer who will spend the entirety of a question today wandering off the Icecrown map. HC SVNT DRACONES. Frostwyrms, anyway.

As a warning, the answer to said question contains what some players will consider a spoiler, so don’t read past the cut if you don’t want to know anything about an upcoming Icecrown encounter.

TAD asks…

Will experience acceleration go away once Cataclysm drops?

We don’t think so, because the 1-85 grind for a new character will still be pretty lengthy even with experience acceleration, but truthfully we don’t know. I’d argue that Blizzard doesn’t have much of a reason to change current leveling speed, because it’s only efficient if the character in question is outfitted in heirloom items (particularly the chest and shoulders with the +experience boost). This obviously won’t happen for a genuinely new player seeing the content for the first time. As you’ve probably also observed with alts on a different realm from your main, leveling’s not that fast without being bankrolled by another toon or sitting on a pile of heirlooms.

Then again, I’m one of those crazy people who enjoys questing for its own sake and I’ll be doing all the new quests anyway, so what do I know?

Continue reading The Queue: Allie gets lost in Icecrown edition

The Queue: Allie gets lost in Icecrown edition originally appeared on WoW.com on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, News items, Instances, Bosses, Wrath of the Lich King

Today a guildy induced me to run Heroic Halls of Reflection on my tanking warrior. Sighing, I slapped on my heroic set and we went into the instance (actually, we ran all three ICC heroics) and when we finally got to the Lich King, said guildmate said “Okay, we’ll do the ledge strat.” I had no idea what the ledge strat entailed, and told him so. He said “go stand over there” and so, bewildered, I did as he asked.

What followed completely trivialized the event. So much so that I’m torn: on the one hand, I hate HoR in no small part due to the difficulty of picking up multiple abominations and tanking them while also trying to get aggro on the spell casting Risen Witch Doctors. The ‘ledge’ strategy is very simple: let Arthas walk past you and lumber his slow way up the tunnel after Jaina or Sylvanas like he always does. Meanwhile, the hordes of undead he spawns? They come running back to you, even if you’re still at the door to the ledge. Since you could never stop the Lich King from getting to Jaina anyway, you don’t lose anything for staying behind him, except that you no longer have to adjust in the event that the Lich King is getting closer to you with his aura of hurty.

Continue reading Halls of Reflection exploit trivializes Lich King encounter

Halls of Reflection exploit trivializes Lich King encounter originally appeared on WoW.com on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Instances, Expansions, The Burning Crusade, Lore, Leveling, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm

As we’re heading towards the final confrontation with the Lich King and the end of this chapter of the World of Warcraft saga, we end up reminded of how much of Wrath of the Lich King was designed and never used, or used sparingly, or even resurrected later, fittingly enough. But not only do we have loads of models that either weren’t used at all or were used later in places completely unrelated to where they were supposed to drop, we have entire zones that either didn’t happen at all, or did but which don’t seem to go anywhere.

Continue reading The Wrath you never saw

The Wrath you never saw originally appeared on WoW.com on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Breakfast topics, Features, Classes, Talents, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King

While thinking about the lack of tanking fist weapons, I got into a discussion with my wife about her favorite ability (or perhaps my favorite ability of hers), Misdirection. The discussion came out of the fact that I basically threw her into the deep water by having her misdirect the adds on a TotC 25 Anub kill last night (which she did spectacularly, of course) and from there we started talking about one of the seventy billion Halls of Lightning runs we did yesterday. (Seriously, Halls of Lightning? You can stop now. No, really, I’m fairly certain I’ve killed Loken enough times.) The rogue in this group was simply phenomenal. Solid DPS, didn’t stun mobs when I tried to pull them back, didn’t constantly say ‘go go go’, and used Tricks of the Trade whenever he was going to open up on a big trash pull. Seriously, if you could adopt gnome rogues from another realm and just keep them in your backpack to pop into the open DPS slot in your pugs I’d have done so. I salute you, sir or madam.

Continue reading Breakfast Topic: Celebrated Mechanics

Breakfast Topic: Celebrated Mechanics originally appeared on WoW.com on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Warrior, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, News items, Expansions, The Burning Crusade, BlizzCon, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Wrath of the Lich King

Wow, that was a year, huh? From the dizzying highs of fury spec in Naxxramas to the somewhat less dizzying highs of Ulduar, arms’ constant evolution and protection spec’s astonishing makeover as the expansion launched, 2009 was a year that saw warriors sway from top DPS and solid tanks as if in some kind of gale force wind. Armor Penetration went from a stat we’d take if we had to and is now one of our top DPS stats, Block got a makeover that led to changes in how abilities like Shield Block and Shield Slam calculate, and in general we saw the effects of stat inflation on gear really have an effect on us and how we stack up to other classes as tanks and DPS. If you were a tanking warrior in Naxx on January 1st. 2009, for example, you may have had upwards of 35k health. (To be honest, it’s hard for me to remember, it may have gotten up to 38k if you stacked stamina.) Now, a geared TotGC tank walking into ICC can pretty easily hit 54 to 55k health fully raid buffed.

And it’s only going up from here. Icecrown Citadel promises much improved itemization as well as crazy old school procs that should have warriors, be they DPS or tanks, salivating.

Warriors have definitely had their ups and downs this year, but I think we can say we’re ending the year on a fairly high note. Fury DPS has managed to get back to a competitive place with the new weapons, arms still lags behind but has solid PvP and PvE uses, and protection is quite possibly the single strongest tanking class by virtue of sheer flexibility: other tanks may have more health, more armor, or more AoE threat, but protection’s suite of abilities includes standouts like Shockwave, Vigilance, Spell Reflection and Warbringer, making it possibly #2 in every single tanking category when no class can claim to be #1 in them all. Let’s look at some changes and how they shook out for warriors.

Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Warrior of 2009

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Warrior of 2009 originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Shaman, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Expansions, Classes, (Shaman) Totem Talk, Wrath of the Lich King

2009 has been a year of almost continuous changes for shamans. It seems that not a patch has gone by without some changes to the class, some major, some not so severe. The class has seen mysterious DPS shortfalls, a minor controversy about health in PvP that then carried over into PvE content with the high levels of AoE damage in Ulduar with patch 3.1. Flametongue Weapon saw changes to prevent enhancement shamans from using caster weapons. Resto got a fairly substantial review and some significant tweaks. Elemental also saw some talents redesigned.

While all of this was going on, shamans also saw some controversy about itemization, gear scaling and having to share caster mail between two specs that value different stats, as well as the constant battle with holy paladins to keep their grubby, grasping mitts off of our mail. Yeah, we know you don’t want that MP5 plate, but since you’re the only ones who can possibly get anything out of it, go away and leave our precious alone. (Cue the pages of discussion on why it’s perfectly acceptable for holy paladins to take caster mail and explanations in detail of why I’m an inhuman monster who drowns fish. Yes, fish, That’s how evil I am.)

Now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way (remind me to tell you the story of the year my mom beat Santa Claus up in front of the extended family) we move on to shamans in 2009.

Continue reading Totem Talk: The Shaman of 2009

Totem Talk: The Shaman of 2009 originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Breakfast topics, Expansions, Features, The Burning Crusade, Lore, Bosses, Wrath of the Lich King

From time to time it occurs to me that my character, were I a better roleplayer, has actually been to a whole lot of places. He’s seen a ridiculous amount of things and would have a really hard time settling down on a farm somewhere on Azeroth or whatever it is old adventurers do when they’re tired of killing old gods, elemental monstrosities, Dragon Aspects, ancient liches, and Illidan Stormrage, to name just a few.

It really occurred to me on a visit to Darnassus, in fact, to turn in the quest “A Cautious Return” that I should be able to do more than just hand the dude a note. I mean, I killed Illidan! I’ve kicked Kil’Jaeden’s butt back down the Sunwell myself! I went back in time and fought Archimonde. (By the way, Tyrande, thanks for the slow fall item and all.) Lore wise, I’ve pretty much seen everything at this point and soon, I’ll be running off to fight Arthas. You’d think I could say “hey, take it easy” to that Sentinel for the poor guy.

When you think about all our characters have seen (even new characters leveled from 1 to 80 with this expansion have traveled to an alien world and then to a frozen wasteland stuffed with titan relics and undead like the worst pizza crust ever) these are some really experienced folks (hence that bar on your interface, I guess) and I find myself wondering what kind of stories they’d tell. So now I ask you, what stories would your character tell? What lore moments were the ones you think he or she would be more moved by, impressed by, or pleased to have been a part of? For that matter, which ones were the best for you as a player?

Breakfast Topic: When you were there originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Druid, Paladin, Warrior, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, News items, Instances, Classes, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King

Usually, I am the ‘perfectionist tank’ in a run. I want things to go perfectly: I want to never lose aggro, I want the DPS to all attack the proper target, I want the healer to, well, okay, I mostly just want the healer to heal us, I’m not looking for anything fancy there. As long as a healer seems to be casting healing spells I’m willing to cut her or him a lot of slack, especially in dungeons like Halls of Reflection where people often die through not moving out of giant, inky pools of blackness on the floor that they stand in as if they were instead duck ponds full of adorable baby ducklings. There are no ducklings in the fetid wells of corruption, guys.

Last night, however, I had a sort of small revelation. First and foremost, I was stressing myself way the heck out over a pick up group with four folks I was likely never to see again. Secondly, the faster you go in a PuG, the less likely perfection is to be attainable, and if four people want speed and one guy wants flawless, you’ll get very fast flaws. So that meant I’ve come up with an entirely new tanking philosophy for the new five mans, and an entirely new way to gear for them. I’d talk about both.

Continue reading Use brute force, Luke

Use brute force, Luke originally appeared on WoW.com on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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