Just what is a hardcore guild anyway? And how do you define a hardcore player? This has been a pretty big question for me and the guild I’m in. Ask around and you’ll probably get a different answer from every person. It’s one of those hard-to-define attribute that means different things to different people. In…
Tag: raiding
The Merits of Old Content
One of the discussions I hear popping up every so often is about old content. It’s a bit of a shame that every time a new tier of raiding comes out that the old tier gets abandoned, gathering dust and cobwebs. The Justice and Valour point system means that new raiders can skip old content…
Mages and Patch 4.2
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…
Playing Cards at the Carnival
Confession time: I like to take my time when levelling characters. I’ve tried levelling at breakneck speed and it just isn’t for me. Nowadays I prefer to take things at my own pace – I have a bunch of alts that still aren’t at level cap in Warcraft, while in Rift I’m only about two…
Burnout By The Numbers
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…
Caster Legendary Staff: The Lowdown
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…
Managing Limited Game Time
There are times when I miss my youth. Back when I was a student I’d be free to play the night away, blasting cyborgs in Quake 2 or bludgeoning head-crabs in Half-Life. I’d blitz through a game in four days straight, chomping through single player content like a man possessed. The other thing was that…
The Incredible Shrinking Raidgroup
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…
Encounters That Rock!
There’s a great shared topic over at BlogAzeroth right now: Naithin asks what causes an encounter to ‘click’ in our minds. When do we reach that point when a boss fight switches from being a difficult challenge to possible, then to trivial? It’s a good question, but I don’t think it’s just down to preparation,…
Justice Points Are Useless
Gearing up for PvE content has always been a struggle, and with the difficulty dial set firmly on Cataclysmic you want to make sure that you have the best gear you have access to before you start raiding. But what does having the best gear actually mean? Running heroics until you’re bored of them just…