Tag: cataclysm

My Annual Pass Regret

Posted on by Gazimoff

Warcraft Annual Pass Banner

Back in October last year I made a bold move and signed up to the Warcraft Annual Pass. I figured to myself that it’d be a great deal – I’d still be playing Warcraft, I’d get a free copy of Diablo III and I’d get access to the Mists of Pandaria Beta without having to strike it lucky or jump through hoops. All I had to do was keep paying what I was paying and keep my subscription alive for a year.

After a single quarter-year, I’m really regretting making that decision.

It’s partly a time thing – I don’t have the time to log into Warcraft nearly as often as I’d like. But there’s another aspect to why I feel I’m done with the current expansion pack. My opportunity to pick up the Mage Legendary Staff was cut short with the release of the Dragon Soul raid, with the resultant consequence that my desire to raid was deflated like a misfiring zeppelin. The next tier was little better for me, with Deathwing And Friends lasting all of two weeks until I’d managed to pug my way to LFR victory.

Continue reading “My Annual Pass Regret”

Firelands Raid: In Review

Posted on by Gazimoff

The Hour of Twilight is finally upon us and Patch 4.3 has arrived. I’ve already dived into the new Dragon Soul raid instance a couple of times and I’m having fun with it, although I’m very keen to get into the later boss fights there.

Before I get too heavily involved in new stuff I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the raid we wave goodbye to. Firelands, also known as Tier 12, left me with a bag of mixed opinions. It had some really outstanding and enjoyable fights in some areas, but was marred by a couple of pretty annoying boss mechanics.

To help me explain I’ve put together a short video going through each of the seven different encounters. It helps to demonstrate some of the things I’m talking about, particularly if you’ve not done the encounters yourself.

Continue reading “Firelands Raid: In Review”

Managing Guild Change

Posted on by Gazimoff

“All the world’s a game,
And all the men and women merely gamers”

With apologies to William Shakespeare

This is a tough subject for me and one that comes from recent experience. You see, it’s about how guilds change and how that change is managed by guild leadership.

Some change is inevitable, such as when Blizzard changes the game. Other changes are brought about by the continual joining and leaving of members. Some are even evolutionary, brought about by a gradual shift in focus or change in direction.

Change doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Done right it helps keep your members involved and informed as part of the decision making process. When it’s done badly it causes the opposite, alienating guild members and ultimately leading to them leaving the guild.

Continue reading “Managing Guild Change”

Firelands Legendary Staff: Get Ready!

Posted on by Gazimoff

Patch 4.2 is looming towards us at a steady pace, bringing with it a whole truckload of shiny new stuff for us to get stuck into. The current best guess is that it’ll be hitting live servers on 21st June in US and 22nd June in Europe, putting it at less than two weeks away.

With patch 4.2 comes the Tier 12 raiding content and the new Firelands raid instance. It’s also when the new caster Legendary staff becomes obtainable. Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest will be the single most important item of loot for almost any raiding damage-dealing caster.

Continue reading “Firelands Legendary Staff: Get Ready!”

Mages and Patch 4.2

Posted on by Gazimoff

A lot of us have been in a kind of holding pattern since 4.1 came out. Some of us have been focused on mopping up the current tier of raiding, like a roast dinner with lashings of gravy that you just need a bit of bread to polish off. Others have been filling a few gaps here and there with the troll content, using the new epics to fill a couple of gaps in our gear.

Patch 4.2 is approaching. With it comes the new Firelands raiding and questing zone, the new Mage legendary staff, a new tier of armour (and a new round of sympathy for Priests) and a truckload of other stuff besides. Putting the new juicy content to one side though, there’s the inevitable class changes as well. It’s early days so far and there’s a promise of more to come, but Mages are already tasting both sides of the nerfbat.

Continue reading “Mages and Patch 4.2”

Burnout By The Numbers

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s ironic that almost a year ago I was writing about the same topic and how to cope with it. Back then, players were complaining about being burned out with Wrath. They’d done everything they wanted to, achieved what they wanted and were ready to throw in the towel. I was as well, which is why I wrote about how I cope with hitting a gaming rut.

Yet here we are, a slim 14 weeks since Cataclysm was released and feeling burned out already. These aren’t just isolated cases either – MMO Melting Pot reports that 75% of all respondents to a burnout article on WoW Insider are themselves struggling with the problem.

So what gives? What turns a loyal fanbase of players into burned out deserters in the space of three and a half months?
Continue reading “Burnout By The Numbers”

Caster Legendary Staff: The Lowdown

Posted on by Gazimoff

UPDATE: I’ve done a big roundup of all the most important news relating to Dragonwrath, along with a guide on how to make sure you get one as quickly as possible. You can find all this and more here!

It’s only recently emerged in the Public Test Realm datafiles, but the internet is already rife with speculation about the new Legendary Caster Staff. The dataminers over at MMO-Champion have been diligently hard at work, while the folks over at WoW Insider have been putting their theories to the test. But if you’re looking at putting your hands on one of these incredibly desirable staves how would you go about it?

Possible Caster Legendary Staff (from MMO-Champion.com)

Much like a visit to your local Ikea, this new piece of raiding equipment will come with some assembly required. You’re going to need to do a lot of raiding in order to collect all the materials needed, as well as deep pockets to pick up all those vendor-only items. You’ll also need to work with your guild or raid team in order to ensure success, just as with Shadowmourne. At the moment though we don’t know the whole picture, so a lot of this is conjecture.

Continue reading “Caster Legendary Staff: The Lowdown”

What Cataclysm Means to World PVP

Posted on by moguestposter

This guest post is from Bordy, a longtime friend who doesn’t have a blog of his own and so decided to use mine. You can find him on Twitter @snuffleorc.

Who among us Vanilla Veterans does not look fondly back to the mass battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill? Cataclysm wasn’t what ended these, but it certainly prevented it ever recurring, with the loss of Southshore as an Alliance town.

Southshore and Tarren Mill were roughly equidistant from faction cities (Ironforge and Undercity respectively). The geography of the land was suitable to mass PvP too: No town walls, roughly flat (albeit with a small slope), mostly open ground with minor cover/obstacles and a small tower in the middle. Designers of battlegrounds should take note!

Of course what actually put an end to the SS vs. TM battles was the creation of battlegrounds. These could be instanced and thus enabled Blizzard to spread the server load of all those wanting to participate. The old SS/TM battles could get very laggy, as fun as they were. Battlegrounds though do not, for the most part, offer mass PvP in open ground. Warsong Gulch is just too small (in as far as combatants go), Arathi Basin has a few more combatants and of very uneven terrain. Eye of the Storm again splits forces up. Alterac Valley comes close at times, but is spread out and more recently simply involves a chase to kill NPCs. Strand of the Ancients, Wintergrasp, and Tol Barad all involve assaulting and defending.

Continue reading “What Cataclysm Means to World PVP”

Looking For Dramatic Change

Posted on by Gazimoff

If you ever wanted a minute by minute reading of why tanks and healers feel special, you need look no further than the infamous Looking for Dungeon tool. It’s a bit radical to see tanks get insta-pop dungeons and healers have maybe five minutes while DPS are left to sit around for maybe an hour or more.

Ever wanted to feel third-class? Just roll a pure-class DPS and watch as the queue mocks you, again and again.

But why is this? Surely if we got more people to play tanks or healers then we’d all win from shorter queues? I’m not sure. We’ve had two major tanking changes, firstly to make non-Warrior tanks much more viable and secondly to introduce a whole new class to persuade people to tank. I’ll admit that the LFD tool was introduced after these changes, but still – that means that either nothing has got better or (shudder) things were actually worse than I remember.

Continue reading “Looking For Dramatic Change”

The Incredible Shrinking Raidgroup

Posted on by Gazimoff

I wanted to focus on a particular experiment that Blizzard’s been working on over the years – that of the optimum raid size.  We’ve seen raid sizes start at 40 players in Vanilla, but slowly drop to 25 in Burning Crusade and then 10 players in Wrath. With the new lockout system in Cataclysm, 10-player raiding seems to be becoming the default.

Is smaller raiding the best result through? From a content standpoint Blizzard certainly seems to think so – more groups are running 10-player dungeons than ever before, defeating more bosses and getting more loot from it. Don’t trust me – Lissanna  from Restokin did an excellent analysis of the available stats. The stats might encourage Blizzard to go further down this route by either dropping 25-player raiding entirely or producing 10-player exclusive content. After all, it’s easier to balance for ten players than both ten and 25.

Hang on a minute though – weren’t we raiding dungeons with 8 or 15 people back in Vanilla? And didn’t we think back then that they were just dungeons but nothing special? Sure, they might take an evening to clear but that was the same 5 years ago.

Continue reading “The Incredible Shrinking Raidgroup”