Archive for December, 2009

Arena Footage

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

As promised, here is some video captured during our arena matches last weekend. The matches are between 1850 and 1900 rating. We played many comps like beast cleave, mirror, spell cleave, TSG, etc. I spent a lot of time during these matches doing offensive dispelling, more than usual. The challenge of playing a disc priest is the balance between defensive and offensive play. I have had teammates get global’d during a holy fire cast.

RMP is a lot of fun because of the diverse strategies vs the various comps. We don’t just pick a target to try and global, we pick our CC targets and damage targets and switch when needed. Hopefully these matches offer some strategies for your RMP or other comp.

Match Breakdown:

Match 1: RMP

Get in combat early to prevent sap. Play very aggressive from the start. Offensive dispels on the mage/priest. Mage will CC the rogue while you hit their priest. If the priest doesn’t go down, switch to mage. Throw some defensive dispels on your rogue to help him stay in range. I wasn’t paying attention to the mage and got polymorphed and blinded (the reason Ballsagna went down).

Match 2: Beastcleave

Use CC early. Avoid the initial burst with bloodlust at all costs. I have been killed through pain suppression against this setup. Burn the shaman and CC the paladin. Try to pillar hump to keep hunter off of you. Dispel bloodlust if you have any extra globals.

Match 3: Double Healer (Druid/Disc Priest)/Warrior

CC the priest to take him out of the game and burn the warrior. Dismantle him before shield wall. If the initial burst fails, hard switch to the druid. They will try to outlast you (and they will) so burst is the key.

Match 4-5: TSG

The initial burst will usually be on you. Avoid it as long as you can. Be ready with pain suppression so you have a chance to last through strangulate. Hit the warrior HARD as he comes in to force him to go defensive and avoid a bladstorm on top of the damage. Shackle the DK’s gargoyle if possible. If the warrior gets a bladestorm on top of the strangulate, it is usually game over. Keep abolish disease up on everyone.

Match 6: Disc Priest/Mage/Paladin

We always go for the ret paladin against these comps. Try to force the bubble early and hope a Mass Dispel gets it off in one try. We started with a sap and full dispel of his buffs, then railed him.

Match 7: Warlock/Rogue/Disc Priest

CC on the rogue and dispel priest and burn. Priest can’t keep himself up through the burst.

Match 8: RMP (Shadowplay)

Hit their rogue. GG

Match 9: TSG

Watch the burst as before and hit the warrior hard. Don’t blow fear into a bubble like I do. Predict the burst and PS yourself before it happens. All damage on the Warrior while CC on the pally.

LFG? LFR? Look No Further!

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

With the dawn of patch 3.3, a plethora of new content is now available to keep you distracted from things you should be doing. One of them being cross-realm instancing. If you haven’t used the new LFG tool yet, you should give it a whirl. I’m only writing this because I’ve seen a lot of people asking questions about how the whole system works. So I’m going to try and hit every major problem I’ve experienced so far.

LFG?

First an overview of the interface, which can be accessed by hitting the ” i ” key (assuming you haven’t rebound it).

In Your Face Interface

In Your Face Interface

As you can see, its not very daunting. To start off, indicate the role you wish to serve in a group by selecting one of the three left-most boxes. I like to check the leader box as well, since I’ve had better luck getting groups with it checked.

Why yes good sir, I am perfectly fine with that.

Why yes good sir, I am perfectly fine with that.

Next decide whether or not you want to do a random heroic or regular dungeon. Each has rewards beyond groups formed by players not using the system, or those selecting the instance they want.

Choose Wisely...

Choose Wisely...

If you choose to only queue for a specific dungeon, you will not receive the additional rewards, and you’ll usually have a longer wait than if you queued randomly. You will see an interface like below, simply select the instance you want and hit join.

Select and Join

Select and Join

You’re almost there! You’ll notice an eye looking back and forth on your minimap. This is the LFG tool minimap icon, and it will tell you things like what role you queued as, average wait time, and if you already have group members, what roles are still needed.

Its Not Rocket Science...

Its Not Rocket Science...

When you get a group you should see this dialogue box pop up.

HUZZAH!

HUZZAH!

If everyone in your group accepts, you’ll instantly be transported to the dungeon. If someone bails out, you’ll be moved back to the top of the list and receive another group member and then be transported. If your group completes but you get stuck at the loading screen for a while, don’t panic. You’ll see a message like below when you get out.

Don't Panic!

Don't Panic!


If you receive this message, simply right click the LFG tool’s minimap icon and select Teleport into Dungeon” until you get into one.

Once inside you’ll notice a debuff, this is intended to keep you from copping out and grabbing a new group right away. It lasts 15 minutes, just like deserter.

Don't Be Bad...

Don't Be Bad...

You’ll also notice a Buff, to account for people who might suck.

This almost makes up for sucking

This almost makes up for sucking

When loot drops you’ll notice a new looting option. You can now roll greed on an item and if you win, except instead of receiving the item, you receive what it yields when disenchanted.

I'm Greeding For Shards

I'm Greeding For Shards

And once you’re done, you don’t have to hearth or run out of the instance, simply go back up to the minimap and teleport out of the dungeon.

BUT ONLY WHEN YOU'RE DONE.

BUT ONLY WHEN YOU'RE DONE.

LFR?

Open the Raid tab of your Social window and open the LFR tool. It’s not cross-realm, but it works basically the same as if you were to select a specific dungeon from the LFG tool. Only this time you can opt to have a message available to those who are interested.

New Dungeon System

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

When I first heard about cross-realm dungeons, my immediate thoughts were negative. I didn’t PvE at that time because sub-par players can easily run up a large repair bill for you, even on a rogue. So why would I want to partake in, rather subject myself to, the idiocy of PvE failboating with morons from the entire battlegroup? For barely enough gold to pay my repair bill if I get stuck in a bad group and two Emblem of Frost… Really? C’mon Blizzard, you’re going to need to try harder than that. For once, I’m glad that I was wrong.

Experiences So Far

My first instance was a Heroic Azjol’Nerub. It took me all of 2 minutes to form a group, and needless to say I was impressed. There is no way I couldn’t get into a battleground in that time, even during a holiday. The problem with playing on Tuesday wasn’t that the patch release was buggy, it was that so many people were attempting to use instances that the instance servers were full. It took an additional 5-6 minutes to get an instance. After that, everything ran as smoothly as a geriatrics ward after a trip to a prune juice factory.

I’ve run a good number of instances since then and I have yet to have a truly distasteful experience. For the most part each and every group that I’ve gotten into has been competent. Even more surprising is that I have yet to be in a group that has wiped. Even when the tank was sporting 26k HP unbuffed, we still tore through the instance like a group of old friends. Of course it could just be that the level of gear has progressed to the point were it no longer matters how terrible a player is, they can still make it through a heroic.

Downsides, Warnings, Tips, etc., etc.

Downsides:

Obviously as I mentioned before, there are times when demand for instances are high and there simply isn’t enough room for all players requesting them. It can be frustrating to get a full group but be unable to actually enter the instance.

Another is that players seem to be joining the system, waiting through the queue, and bailing when they become eligible for a group. Luckily, the system is designed to insure a complete a group before it moves on. That being said, sitting around for close to ten minutes while ~25-30 people bail is not fun. Don’t queue if you don’t want to tango.

Another downside that might not be very apparent at first is that people aren’t joining the queue while indicating desire to lead. I sat in queue for 5 minutes, far beyond the normal 50 seconds, and decided to leave and rejoin indicating a desire to lead a group. I had a group within seconds.

Warnings:

Another incentive to queue indicating a desire to lead is that if you aren’t the leader, who is? Blatzkowitz, Superfellow, and I ran a group today and had a party leader that wouldn’t do anything. He would follow and stay close enough to gain reputation for kills, but not actually help. Why not kick them? Well as it turns out, whether by bug or intention, a vote kick cannot be initiated against the party leader.

Finally, a word to the wise, be nice! It takes less time for a party member to vote kick you for something that came across wrong than it takes for you to explain what you meant. Much less time.

Tips:

If you’re looking to get some emblems quick, try picking up the weekly raid and jumping in the new looking for raid tool. Not only are the quest kill targets extremely easy, everyone is doing the quest. So if you’re looking to grab 5 frost and triumph emblems along with 33g 20s, here’s a full list of what you can expect to fight:

Anub’Rekhan Must Die!
Flame Leviathan Must Die!
Ignis the Furnace Master Must Die!
Instructor Razuvious Must Die!
Lord Jaraxxus Must Die!
Lord Marrowgar Must Die!
Malygos Must Die!
Noth the Plaguebringer Must Die!
Patchwerk Must Die!
Razorscale Must Die!
Sartharion Must Die!
XT-002 Deconstructor Must Die!

That’s all, you don’t have to be alive for the kill, just don’t release if you die. Nothing to loot, best of all, nothing to lose.

Patch 3.3 Impressions

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Extra Arena Points

The new change to the PvP daily quest is that it awards 25 arena points as well as the honor and gold that it previously did. While 25 points doesn’t seem like that many, it sure adds up quickly. You can potentially get 175 points per week through doing the PvP daily every day. That amounts to a decent rating increase you would have needed before to get those points per week.

I like that Blizzard is giving new avenues for gear. I also like that they are starting to breath new life into BG’s. I can say that, of the BG’s I have played since the patch went live, people have been trying harder to win. The competition seems stronger and my teammates in random PUGs seem to want to win. I haven’t run across an afk’er yet (not to say that they aren’t out there). This attitude was reflected when Isle of Conquest was the daily. There was some really fun battles that took place because both sides were trying. This makes it more fun for everyone.

Extra Arena Points

Extra Arena Points

LFG Tool

I decided to see what the new LFG tool was all about. I initially did not like how it doesn’t tell you any information while you are in the queue to find a random group, but found that it does not take long. I can see this being a problem down the road when the “new car” smell has gone. If I queue for a random dungeon and it is taking an average of 20 minutes to get groups together, I think that is information I would like to know. I was queued as DPS because I’m enjoying the changes to shadow priests and don’t really enjoy disc healing instances.

It randomly put me into Heroic Violet Hold and matched me with decently geared people. We had a paladin tank who had 40k health unbuffed and a ret pally alongside a marks hunter. Our healer (resto shaman) was the least geared in the group and his gear definitely wasn’t bad. After about 30 seconds in the instance, the hunter left and almost immediately another replacement was found. The rest of the instance went very smoothly and I had a fun time running an old instance with random people.

Overall, this is the LFG tool that should have been in the game years ago. It almost makes finding a group too easy. I can see how some people are worried about it breaking up a server’s community, but I still see a lot of premade groups using the tool to find that last person. As a healer, I usually wanted to heal groups just to help someone out, it was always a lot of work to find that group that was looking for a healer. Not anymore.

LFG Tool

LFG Tool

Gear Changes

One of the patch notes that I had missed during the many times that I read them was the change to the arena gear set bonuses.

Arena Set Bonuses: The two-piece set bonus for all Wrath of the Lich King Arena sets now provides 100 resilience and 29 spell power or 50 attack power. The current four-piece bonus will remain, however it also now provides 88 spell power or 150 attack power.

This change put my priest at 1214 resilience. I like to keep around 1150 resilience to help against cleave teams who try to burn me. This extra bonus not only added spell power by itself, but added extra resilience so that I was able to re-gem some of my gear to lose the extra resilience and trade it for spell power. I now have about 2700 sp as disc which is a big improvement over a number of weeks ago where I was barely breaking 2k due to the amount of resilience that I had to gem for.

New Set Bonus

New Set Bonus

Arena Changes

We haven’t been able to do any arena matches yet to see what affects any new changes have on our games. I know the WotF nerf will take some time to get used to, but won’t affect my team much since I am the only undead. I will have some feedback to those matches tomorrow and hopefully some footage that I can show you.

Featured Addon: Snowfall Keypress

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

It may never have affected you, you might not even have realized it, but keybound abilities in World of Warcraft do not activate until you release the key. This is usually a millisecond difference in most situations, but there may be a time where your key release isn’t instantaneous and the ability will come late.

In your arena matches, that little amount of time could be too late. We’ve all had that moment where a heal just barely didn’t go off in time or a CC didn’t hit quite fast enough.

The addon Snowfall Keypress aims to fix this problem. It makes all of your hotkeys activate abilities on key press not key release. Even if you feel that the little amount of time between pressing and releasing a key will make no difference to you, I would encourage you to download this addon and try it out for a week. Really, what can it hurt?

Head over to the downloads section or to WoWInterface to download this addon.

Playing another character

I have been wanting to start playing another character for some time now. I don’t mean quit playing my disc priest, I just need another character to work on during the “filler” time between arena matches where I just play another game as of late.

I have been thinking of leveling my horde paladin on Dragonmaw and doing some PvE tanking on him. On the other hand, it is pretty late in the expansion and I haven’t taken raiding seriously since early WotLK. Not to mention that I haven’t been in a raiding guild in quite some time.

I think I might go back to my holy paladin and get some PvP gear and maybe find a decent team to PvP with. If I do, I’ll probably have to transfer due to the lack of talent on Dalvengyr.

Gold Guide (1/5)

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for about as long as Blatzkowitz, and there was always one skill that evaded my grasp no matter how hard I tried to attain it, making gold. Recently I’ve figured it out, and I can log on for 2-3 minutes a day and still make over 1000g a week. It’s with a heavy heart that I divulge these seemingly common sense secrets, because it might inhibit my own ability to make gold. And yes, I am fully aware that there are a boatload of gold guides out there, but this one is free, and this one is 5 simple points that can make you a lot of gold (provided it doesn’t burn a hole in your pocket).

Making Gold is like Running a Marathon

Over the years I’ve read the plethora of gold making strategies that spewed forth from the supposedly gifted hands that farmed their purported riches, and most of them were crackpot schemes aimed at making you a WoW millionaire overnight. Many of these guides are targeted at making people with a healthy amount of gold, more gold. Deep down inside we all know its too good to be true, but it’s the same reason people keep playing the lottery. Everyone thinks they have a shot at winning big, that they can win even if they try to run the race like the hare.

In reality, it’s far easier and far less taxing to run the race as a turtle.

It’s ludicrous to tell someone with 300g that they can control the market and drive up prices by buying up all the undercutter’s product and reposting it for a small profit. Unless you’re talking about the linen cloth market, it’s just not going to happen; and if you are, it’s not going to be over a 1s profit. These strategies just aren’t useful to the majority of WoW players.

Don’t Play the Auction House

Far and away the easiest way to get gold is to level a DK and not spend any money on mounts, but only if you can stand to play a DK for 25 levels. But this guide is aimed at those who hate DK’s or 80’s who want to make gold on their main. So I present my first rule of thumb, Don’t Play the Auction House! Guess what, 90% of the guides out there focus on one thing, making the writer, and the top 1% like the writer, MORE GOLD. Don’t believe me? Chess legend Gary Kasperov vs. you for the world chess tournament… who wins? I think you get the picture, if not… I’m sorry it had to come to your attention this way, but you might be retarded.

If you were suckered into playing the AH only to lose gold, and couldn’t figure out what you did wrong. You aren’t alone! A majority of the WoW population will never be successful at playing the Auction House. Why? Because there are hundreds of people on each and every server who live the Auction House. Some spend every moment they are logged checking prices on the AH, scavenging for a posting with a fumbled zero, and monitering the market niches they control with an iron fist. Most use mods to keep archives of the every item’s prices. They will never sell an item for less than it is worth, and they have the gold to make it sell for more than it’s worth. They are the reason you will never win.  But just like life, diligence pays off a hundred times what luck can bring you in a moment.

Practical Steps

I realize that most people will read this and say, “Hey, this guide sucks noodles.” But if just one person takes it upon themselves to do a few dailies, even just the easy ones, and not blow that gold on a crazy scheme, I’ve done my job. My wish is that just a few people would do dailies each day, until the next part of the guide comes out. And furthermore, not spend that gold. I know it sucks, but just try it and see where it gets you. I promise you won’t lose gold.

Keep in mind that this is just a few pixels in the picture, this single strategy won’t make you money very fast. But there are still four more practical strategies to come that you can use to easily make gold.

Think Outside the Box

Friday, December 4th, 2009

A large part of what makes Arenas fun for me is the amount of competition. The same thing that turns people away from Arenas because they are too competitive, is the same thing that I like about them. The changing competition and inability to fully predict what the enemy will do next is what keeps me coming back. If you are more into raiding, imagine if your guild finally got to Anub’Arak except he changed tactics every time you tried to down him. There are no more phases, no more emotes or timers to predict when he’ll use his abilities; only raw teamwork can even come close to beating him. How many of you would still raid? How many wouldn’t fall asleep like you normally do when you run old content?

Playing RMP is the epitome of this competition. If you go into every arena match with set strategies and aren’t ready to break from those strategies, you will end up losing a fair amount of matches. It forces you to think outside the box, to come up with different strategies for each comp that you face and ultimately makes you create strategies on the fly. For example, when we face a mirror comp, we always have the same opening strategy but it rarely ends the same. Some RMPs will focus the rogue, some the mage, some the priest. Not to mention the many variations between. You have to be able to adjust your strategies on the fly and react/predict what your opponent is going to do.

How Casual is Casual?

I keep reading articles here and there about ex-WoW players or current WoW players who feel that the game is too hardcore for them. Whenever I run into a random person in RL who plays WoW, it seems like they don’t have any max level characters. The rare ones who do seem to have a single 80 that doesn’t have any gear let alone knows much about the game.

It would be fun to see statistics on how many players are really that casual. What percentage of accounts have 80s and how many of them actually see endgame PvE/PvP content. Just hearing that I have 3 level 80s makes these people look at me like I must play 24/7 and not have a job or a life. In actuality, I currently play WoW roughly 3-5 hours per week on average and could easily hold my PvP status with playing much less (1-2 hours per week).

On one hand, many would consider me casual because I play little every week. On the other hand, many would consider me hardcore because I have 3 level 80s all of which are in full Epic gear. Being a Hardcore WoW player is nothing what it used to mean. In 2005, I read a statistic that said less than 10% of level 60’s even saw MC let alone killed Ragnaros. Think about the old ranked PvP system where 1 person would get rank 14 per week per realm. Thats only ~52 people per realm per faction per year.

If the game gets to a point where epics are handed out freely without any work or any value, I will no longer have interest in the game. Take away that competition and the game will be a MMO version of peggle.

Live Stream

Lately, I have been streaming my play through Xfire. Add me as a friend or check out my stream at http://www.xfire.com/live_video/ferngully You can usually check out all of our Arena games and some other PvP that I do.