Posts Tagged ‘LFG’

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.

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.