The Burrow

A side effect I hadn’t twigged until it was mentioned on the beta forums, but is blindingly obvious when I think about it.  For those players who have had a friendly mage portal them to Dalaran, make sure you move your alts back to old Azeroth prior to the 7th of December or expect to have some “interesting times” moving them through Northrend as a level (something very low).

I don’t expect Blizzard to “fix” this for us, for those who have moved a level 20 to Dalaran we know it’s a high level zone which we could not get to by ourselves, therefore it is up to us to make sure we can get back out again if the world changes.

Let’s face it the world does change so doing things which are outside the capabilities of your alt are always a risk.

This will not affect me as I am already planning on moving all my alts to Stormwind or Ironforge prior to the patch dropping, the ones with flying are likely to be parked right by the trainer in Stormwind with a few hundred gold in their back pockets.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAGmInvd984]

It remains a period of change in Warcrack at the moment, with players coming and going, mostly going to be honest.  Yet again I join a guild and one of the core officers drops a few weeks later, so just bad timing or is the universe conspiring against me.  Does this actually change anything, well that’ll depend on whether the feel of the raids themselves alters in a manner which I’m not comfortable with.

Onward tanks, you only have your durability to loose!

Patch 4.0.1 is coming soon, with it are some major changes in the way tanking and the other roles work.  Shortly after (7/Dec/2010 to be precise) things change even further with the new content, where that shiny gear you’ve been building will rapidly become just so much purple junk.

Now, given these changes I give you some wise words from a Crab we’re all rather fond of (except when he talks about nerfing Paladins to the ground…)

“Right. If you are trying to AE tank and a bad dps is attacking the wrong target and dies, we call that justice.” – Ghostcrawler

So you’ve heard it from the eight legged wonder, AoE zergfests are dead, pick the target the tank marks, focus down that target, use CC on the marked targets.  Behave, don’t be a dick or you will have a repair bill.

Oh and as a final parting thought, the durability costs are being levelled, you’re going to have the same repair bill as the tank, suck on that one for a while.

Only a mad, crazy & drunk dwarf could have put up with the beatings which were dished out to him this holiday without handing in his notice and relocating somewhere more hospitible.  Though to be fair, it was his own fault for spending the year getting rat arsed, swearing about the other dwarves and how no one loves him and then finding more beer.

If he had spent the year working out in ICC like the rest of us then he too could have had the twin joys of beer and shiny plate.

So, Direbrew, here’s to you.  I’ll see you again in 12 months please take it easy on the ale, and work out a bit.

I’ve been listening to the WoW.com podcast and they’ve just made a decent point, now is not the time to be farming ICC (or any raid) for gear.  Let’s face it even on the most pessimistic estimates we’ll have a new expansion within the next three months, all our gear will be replaced before we see the first tier of raiding content at 85, we’ll have new mechanics and approaches to learn in how we handle levelling, dungeons and raid content (well hello there cc, nice to see you back in the game).

This does tie in with what Team Pirate is up to, we aren’t looking grinding the raids on our Sunday slot for gear or rep at the moment, the focus is shifting to “let’s actually kill this thing, we want to see the end of Ulduar”.  While some of the team will be able to use some upgrades from the place the bulk of the drops are going to end up as gold or shards, what we will be getting is the kills, some achievements.  Knowing that we can work as a larger group to clear possibly the best raid instance Blizz have put together.

It is a strange time we’re working through, ICC has been done to death, and then some, realistically the only reason to go there is for completeness on achievements, particularly the heroic mode ones.  Which is why guilds are imploding left, right and center or where they’re strong enough going on hiatus until Cata drops.  Even those putting themselves on hold will have problems with those raiders who do want to keep kicking a boss where it hurts leaving and heading off to pastures new hunting for some form of solid raiding action.  Rebuilding good solid teams with high attendance / standby rates is going to be a challenge in the early part of Cataclysm.  As one of the officers of the now defunct raiding guild pointed out, Wrath brought lots of new raiders into the game the capabilities were variable, not entirely surprising but it’s a useful datapoint.

Does this mean the death of raiding, or that it’s been dumbed down too far, or any of the other QQ which always flies around when a group thinks that they’re no longer in that nice elite slot on the bell curve.  No.  There are mistakes in wrath, where’s my CC!, but I’ve managed to see all the content where with the TBC model I would probably have got bored and cancelled my subscription 6-9 months ago and gone off to another game.

Where does this leave us as we peer into the coming darkness, hopefully Blizz can tune the casual / hardcore raiding balance further, both groups need to be catered for and throwing the major part of the resources into raid instances which only a minority see is a design decision which doesn’t really match the whole userbase.  Moving to keeping purples as “epic” (ie, raid loot), on balance I think it keeps some people happy without actually affecting the gearing, let’s be honest it’s only a damm colour.

Where’s the conclusion?  Dammed if I know, I’ll probably mumble on about this sort of thing again in the future.

As predicted, we came, we saw, we had our arses kicked but he might well be ours next week.

This was our first serious week on Yoggie, after nuking down the weekly (FL) on 25-man we decamped back into our 10-man raid and wandered down for some ‘discussion’ with the old god on the nature of the universe.

Phase 1 :  Dances with Guardians

We’re getting better, of the course of our normal raid (3hrs) we went from “dying to lots and lots of guardians” to “only getting a couple of extras at the end of the phase”.  The critical thing to learn is if it looks like you “might just get through that gap” then there isn’t sufficient room and go round the long way.  Yogg is a survival fight, it’s about control and making sure that each phase has it’s issue kept under control.

So take your time, wait for the mobs to reach the Sara tank.  The “collecting” tank will be wandering around as needed, don’t pewpew his mobs as he’ll be more interested in moving safely than holding onto them against aggressive DPS.

Phase 2 : Tentacles?  When did this become Anime?

Avoid constrictors where possible, do your own damage to constrictors rather than passively waiting to be released (easier for casters than melee types).  One tank (and only one) is needed on the Crushers to dance in to interupt the channelled spell, the rest of the melee should be on the Corruptor.  Ideally this is where our bear tank goes kitty for some extra damage.  Portal people, take the time to get into place before they spawn, this gives more time in the illusion and therefore more time on the brain.

More brain time means we have more clean up time outside and a shorter overall P2, this is good.

Sanity.  Particularly for portal people, get out before the cast is finished, if this means cancelling a spell, go for it, run away.  Spend time standing in pretty green, it’s nice.

Phase 3 : Errr… what, we got here?

This was the (very pleasant) surprise of the raid.  We managed to burn into Phase 3, which did have it’s downside as we han’t briefed on it.

Phase 3 is about raw numbers on the boss, keeping the guardians tanked and being focus fired down in order and sanity, watch the sanity.

Where do we go from here

More practice and I reckon we have ourselves some Old God Sushi.

Then Razorscale & The Council and we have ourselves a cleared instance.

It’s official.  December 7th 2010.

Gnomes or Goblins?  Who cares, we demand that their tinkering is brought to a swift and painful end to prevent the creation of anymore poor deformed souls such as this example.

Their madness must be brought to an end!