And Two Rogues

Cataclysm Beta: Tanking Throne of the Tides

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:04:00 +0000

Here's (hopefully anyway, not too sure about this embed thing) some more visual stuff about the Cataclysm Beta: me, tanking Throne of the Tides on my Death Knight.

The second part is encoding as we speak, sadly I accidently turned off recording somewhere after the second boss so I don't have any footage of the rest of the instance.

You're probably better off clicking it and watching it on Youtube so you can select HD quality there and such, and even the smallest embed size seems to get cut off with this layout, so meh >.>

Cataclysm Talent Trees for rogues.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:16:00 +0000

Before I get into the lv 80 stuff, let me just say that this new talent system will make leveling a rogue alt (and possibly other, lesser classes, but why would you want to level other classes when you can level a rogue, right?) exponentially more fun.

Instead of having to sinister strike spam your way to level 50 before daggers actually becomes viable because of Mutilate, choosing Assassination at level 10 will give you Mutilate, and 20 more energy. Obviously you can still choose Combat, which will give you Blade Flurry (though not the one currently sitting in your Live realm talent trees), or you could go Subtlety and get Shadowstep.

Ideally you have a pair of heirloom daggers around, because if I remember correctly (good) daggers are pretty hard to come by, but perhaps Blizzard will revamp the old dungeons some more and put a few dagger toys in there for us.

In any case the low level landscape will drasticly change, both PvE and PvP wise.

Interesting to note is that, for example the +20 energy bonus will also apply to lv 85 raiding rogues. Vigor and Improved Vigor were those things you never had the talent points and glyph slots for, but would still be nice to have. If you will be raiding as Assassination in Cataclysm, we'll be doing it with a bigger energy pool, which might come in handy for energy pooling.

On an semi-related note, I wonder how fast my guild will level up and have access to guild perks. We're a fairly big and active guild (usually hovering around 100 accounts) so the first wave of Cataclysm leveling should probably level the guild nicely, between questing and instancing together.

Cataclysm Beta Screenshots [SPOILERS]

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 10:37:00 +0000

As promised, a second batch of screenshots. I hit 81 in Vashj'ir and decided to go to Mount Hyjal. I also made two premade characters on Horde side to experiment a little there, and to explore Horde stuff without getting my head clobbered.

Random flight over Eastern Kingdoms: Menethil Harbor.

No, this isn't a watermount. It's a rather interesting quest.

Gates of Ogrimmar: Under Construction.

The inside of Orgrimmar looks almost unrecognizeable. Note the two zeppelin towers in the back, on top.

The Tauren get a cozy place in Orgrimmar.

And the Troll "district" looks more Troll than ever.

Because people need glyphs even in Cataclysm: all glyphs at 3s20c. Free Battered Hilts, too. This might be my chance to do the quest without paying 16k gold for it.

Further questing in Vashjir.

Mount Hyjal has some idyllic green places, but it's not all moonrays and flowers.

Comment moderation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:26:00 +0000

FUCK YOU CHINESE SPAMMERS MWUAHAHAHA.

Comment moderation enabled. Everything that does not contain spam links will be approved. Yes, even normal Chinese replies.

More Cataclysm screenshots incoming later, dear readers. I have my students job to keep me from playing Beta all day, so I've been gathering screenies over the week and will unload them on you sometime this weekend.

Cataclysm Beta: first impressions [SPOILERS]

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:32:00 +0000

I've been going places a bit in the beta.

First I went to Stormwind on my rogue, I needed to re-learn some skills. It's very odd to be able to fly in Stormwind. Anyways, worth sharing with you: this beautiful new fountain, where the new and improved Stormwind Keep is.

After that I decided to try out the new starting areas. I made a Worgen Hunter with the incredibly imaginative name "Pie" (I know someone will like that) and off we went.

The Worgen starting area is full of lore and felt really cool. However, around level 3 my pet died, and due to a bug I couldn't get it back, so around level 8 I was really annoyed at running around without a pet. I decided to try the goblins instead.
The goblin starting area is weird in a fun way, and on Kezan you hardly have to do any combat at all.

Overall though, I liked the lore-filled, dark setting of the worgen starting area more than the goblin one. After this first look at the starting areas (my characters are only 6-8 or so, there's still quite a bit to go) I went for a peek at the two 78+ leveling zones, Mount Hyjal and Vashj'ir. Recognize anything on that first screen?

I also had a go at tanking the two semi-available instances, Blackrock Caverns and the Throne of the Tides. Grab a small bucket to catch the drool when watching Throne of the Tides screenshots.

The fourth boss of Throne of the Tides was incredibly fun, so fun in fact that I'd rather not spoil it. You'll thank me when you do the boss yourself for the first time !

The instance was still under construction - the last boss was impossible to kill because he kept bugging out, there was an unfinished elevator, and Blizz notified us of this in their own way:

Beta for me.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 10:38:00 +0000

Unlike Adam, I did opt in for the Cataclysm Beta, and I did get in. I'm in the process of downloading the gigabytes of patch data.

I have copied over both my rogue and my death knight. I mostly wanted to try out the death knight changes, but I remembered that being a Bloodsail Admiral might be a bit of an issue if I wanted to explore the world, so I decided to copy my rogue as well.

I will have to experiment a lot, and I'm curious to see how the stat simplifying turns out. But the first thing I'm going to do is explore. I know from the previous expansions that I lose a lot of time with this. Especially with Azeroth changing, I'd want to see what has changed. Beta will give me the chance to prepare for Cataclysm so I can get right to questing and instancing when it goes live.

I'll probably play the starting zones for the new races too. I know I enjoyed the Draenei and Blood Elf starting areas, and the DK one (especially the DK one, oh god that was awesome), and even though I probably won't make a permanent goblin or worgen, I'd have fun doing these zones.

If you have any questions regarding rogues or death knights, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to reply to them once I can play the beta :D

Random ravings

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:22:00 +0000

Grab your favorite time machine for a moment and warp back with me in time, towards the end of the Burning Crusade. At that moment, my main is a druid, and the character that this blog centers around is a male human with the two best swords for his level, fiery enchants, hacking away at ogres in Tanaris.

At some point, something in my brain short-circuits. Even though I've been advocating druid love amongst guildies for over a year, even using /g (""\(O.o)/"") RAWR as my standard guild greeting, I decide for myself that I will set aside my druid and make my rogue my main.

Information about the Wrath beta is everywhere, there are movies about death knights soloing elite group quests. I remember swearing I'd never roll one, too. This changes to rolling one for the starting area because I hear it's awesome, and because I'm secretly curious about this new type of resource system.

Fast forward to today, and ... apart from the longer raid experience and gear, my DK has caught up with my rogue main, and will probably become my main in Cataclysm.

What will happen to the blog you say? I'm not sure. I might start a DK blog, I might fall back on my rogue anyway in Cataclysm. At the moment, I'm enjoying my DK more.
Though I've also enjoyed sharing rogue-specific tips with one of our newer rogues.
So yeah, who knows.

Cataclysm Rogue Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:07:00 +0000

As you should already know, we were given a preview of Cataclysm talents for a few select classes, one of them being us rogues.

I could try and analyse these to death but since it's only a preview and Blizzard is looking for early feedback on them, I'd rather wait until I can try them out myself when I get into the Beta (Ssshh, it's a strategy *hint blizzard: gief beta inv*)

Anyway, the talent trees are being juggled with a bit, some talents move across the trees, others just move up and down tiers within a tree. Hunger For Blood is gone, as was announced, and we get a new skill that smells of Hunter's Mark (First we get a misdirect and now a hunter's mark, hmmm ...).

There are some talents that beg for attention, though. For example ..

Improved Expose Armor (3 points)
Gives a 33/67/100% chance to refund all combo points used when performing your Expose Armor ability.

Deep in the Assassination tree. With this talent Expose Armor only costs 25 energy to apply. Probably intended for PvP, but who knows.

Venomous Wounds (3 points)
Each time your Rupture or Garrote deals damage to an enemy that is afflicted with your poison, you have a 15/30/45% chance to deal with 616/619/621 additional Nature damage.

Also deep in Assassination tree. No more Ruptureless cycles for Muti rogues, I suppose *sadface*

Vendetta (1 point)
Marks an enemy for death, increasing all damage you deal to the target by 20% and granting you unerring vision of your target, regardless of concealments such as Stealth and Invisibility. Lasts 30 seconds.

The replacement for Hunger for Blood. No cost given at the moment, half the duration of Hunger for Blood. At the moment it's even more powerful than the previous incarnation of Hunger for Blood, so I suspect that 20% to go down.

Reinforced Leather (5 points)
Increases your armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 10/20/30/40/50%.

A strange talent in the middle of the combat tree. No PvE use whatsoever unless we're going to be tanking so I suppose this is to make combat rogues more able to go toe to toe with plate wearers without feeling like a naked clothie.

Other than that, Honor Amongst Thieves is getting reworked, looking a bit like a mix between an improved version of what it is now and Leader of the Pack:

Increases the ranged and melee critical hit chance of all party and raid members by 5%. When any player in your party or raid critically hits with a ranged or melee ability, you have a 33/66/100% chance to gain a combo point on your current target. This effect cannot occur more than once every 4/32/2 seconds.

Addon Rambles: SUF

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:41:00 +0000

I've been an avid user of Pitbull unit frames for quite a while, but recently I switched to Shadowed Unit Frames (SUF).

Now, it's not that Pitbull was too complicated or something similar - the thing that made me switch was the rune display. Pitbull gives you this standalone bar with fancy rune graphics. That's nice and all, but when a rune is on cooldown it's fairly hard to see that in my opinion.

The way SUF displays your runes is a lot more minimalistic. I have three screenshots here, the first is the normal rune display with all runes (BBFFUU) up.

In the second, a few of my runes are on cooldown, you can notice this because of the lowered opacity and non-full bars. When the bar is full the rune is back up. You can easily tell I have one of each rune up.

In the last screenshot I show how Death runes are displayed: simply gray-colored bars. One FU pair has been converted to Death runes here.

Another feature of SUF I'm pretty happy with (and one that is also of use for my rogue) is the fact that you can anchor frames to eachother. For example, I have my Focus and Focus Target anchored to the top of my own unit frame.

This way, when I built the UI or when I want to rebuild it, I only have to move my own frame and the others follow automaticly. In Pitbull, you'd have to manually reposition every frame seperately.

Which unit frames do you use? Any particular reason why you choose those over the others available?

The Achievers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:23:00 +0000

Things have been falling into place a bit for my guild and myself, and we've achieved a few milestones.

On my mage alt, after repeated checking at irregular hours, I got the Higher Learning achievement and the pet that goes with it. While I usually am not a big pet fan, I think I might use this in my roleplaying, since it kinda looks like a "mage voidwalker". Yes I look like a warlock in this screenshot, but I'm not.

Our ICC10 team managed to down the Lich King, though yours truly didn't have the time to join them, I can probably tag along on some other run sometime.

Also in the course of last week, our healing lead and beloved co-GM managed to get his last Valanyr fragment, and we went to complete the darn mace for him. This was actually the third time I saw Vezax or so and I was on interrupting duty on it, so that was nice and stressy, but in a suprising twist we managed to get the Shadowdodger achievement as well so it all paid off.

We did Yogg-Saron with three keepers up so the guy would actually have a chance to throw the mace at Yogg rather than stressing about the raid dieing (we were already running kinda low on healers that night).

With Val'anyr crafted and The Lich King's ice cold blood on our hands, we can officially close our WOTLK raiding, almost anyway. When Ruby Sanctum comes out, we'll have to down whatever that dragon was named again, and a 25-man LK kill would be nice, as would protodrakes / frostwyrms, but I don't really see it happen to the major part of our guild.

That being said, as the officer team, we can probably review our WOTLK raiding career now and see what we want to do differently in Cataclysm.

A rogue vs a Lich King

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 20 May 2010 09:55:00 +0000

Obviously, this post will 'spoil' the Lich King fight for you, so if you'd rather not know about this fight ... *red flash* you didn't see it.

What this is not

This isn't a strategy guide or such. To know what is happening in the fight, go read a bossguide at the appropriate sites.
This post is meant as an explanation of how Immortalis tries LK10, and how I handle the strategy as a rogue.

Phase 1

In phase one, not a lot is going on that is of concern for a rogue. The only thing we really have to watch out for is the Necrotic Plague.
If you get this debuff, you need to run towards the tank taking care of Shambling Horrors and Drudge Ghouls and wait until your designated cleanser makes the debuff jump to the ghouls (or force it to jump by cloaking it).
Other than that, you just DPS the Lich King as hard as possible, and help out the tank with Tricks.

When the phase ends, the safest spot to run to would be the ranged and healers clump, because your Horror tank might still have the Necrotic Plague and we don't want that to spread.

Phase 2

A short phase follows where you fight some ghost copies of your teammates at the sides of the platform while the ranged shoot at frost orbs. Not a very interesting phase, IMO. Tricks them to your tank and nuke them asap.

Phase 3

In phase three, there's two things that require our attention. First, the defile. Always be aware of your position on the platform - if you should get a defile, you DON'T want it to happen under your raid, you have a few seconds to sprint to the edge and drop the defile out of harm's way.
The other issue are the valkyr, which pick up a random raid member in an attempt to throw him/her off the ledge (not a very cool death but it gets the job done).

The problem, then, is combining the two. Stopping a valkyr from throwing off a raid member is easier said than done when a defile is in your way.
We always try to "control" the path valkyr will take by dividing the circle in the center into two slices of pie, and depending on defiles we position ourselves somewhere when a valkyr is coming.
Collapse onto that point, then spread out again to minimize defile risk. In the screenshot, you can see how we're all on the right side (apart from a naughty shaman who recently got a defile).
The orange arrows are possible paths valkyr will take, and the red arrow shows the danger the shaman is in - if a valkyr were to pick him up, he would be thrown off on the other side, away from all of us - we would not be able to stop the valkyr in time.

Phase 4

Similar short phase to Phase 2, nuke the spirits. They come a bit faster this time and you don't want several of them up when the next phase begins.

Phase 5

In this phase, the sentence "death from above" comes to mind. There's a bunch of spirits coming from above, and the ranged has to kill them. Nuke the Lich King, but beware of death from above. They HURT.

Also, in a suprising twist, the Lich King randomly tries to suck the soul out of people using Frostmourne. If you survive the initial attempt, you end up in Frostmourne, where Arthas' fathers soul is battling yet another spirit. As a rogue, you nuke the spirit and interrupt its cast.

In this shot, the spirit was already dead - I didn't want to risk the fight for a screenshot since we were having a great attempt.

I'm baaaaack

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:49:00 +0000

Okay, wow. The last time I posted here, my guild did Ulduar for the first time ... that has been a while, to say the least.

Character progress

What have I been up to ? Well, you can check the armories of my characters, of course, but the TL;DR version is that my guild is 10/12 in ICC25 and working on Lich King in ICC10, and I've had a chance to give him a poke as well.

Personally I'm a big fan of Icecrown Citadel. The atmosphere is Black Temple-flavored grimness all over again, but with the added touch of ice cold blue/cyan. Setting foot on the Frozen Throne gave me a small loregasm... and fights like Saurfang or Festergut are just great to test our DPS potential since, for melee at least, it's pretty much tank 'n spank.

Guild birthday

Immortalis recently celebrated their 1 year anniversary, and we did it by marching through Stormwind and Ironforge, basejumping off the Purple Parlor, and raiding the Horde faction leaders.

Some screenshots here.

Cataclysm spoilers

As with most blogs, I'll add a spoiler tag somewhere to warn you when I'm about to spoil stuff for you.

Minor glyphs and fun

Pewter from The Mental Shaman asks in her post about Cataclysm professions (spoilers, obviously!) what Minor Glyphs should be about. In my opinion, we have a fun minor glyph (Blurred Speed for temporary waterwalking), a few useful ones (Safe Fall and Vanish) and the rest is mostly useless. Now, if we compare our useful minor glyphs with other classes, we could still think of them as 'more fun' - speeding up when vanishing is a pretty unique way of adding value to that skill, while removing a reagent is more of a convience thing.

Not dead yet

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:48:00 +0000

Hello dear readers!

Just a message to confirm that I'm not dead yet - real life is quite busy (exams and now resits) and so is WoW (finally raiding Ulduar 25!).

I bought a new computer and it took me a while to find my photoshop install CD so this post doesn't have a proper pic to accompany it.

Recent Achievements

Some noteworthy achievements I obtained since my last post... let's see...
We finally got around to downing the city leaders again, so I got a black war bear.
I noticed I only needed a few more heroics for it so I did the right heroics and got the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title.
I worked towards the Argent Tournament dagger and got the title Aeltyra of Stormwind in the process - not particularly something I was aiming for, I use it as my PvP title but meh.

Gearing up

I also worked on my reputations and such a bit to get my gear up - the bracers from Wyrmrest Accord and the boots from Argent Crusade.
We did Naxx and the loot gods granted me two fist weapons (Calamity's Grasp and The Hand of Nerub) so I am combat specced now, and the badges got me a new ring.

Raiding Ulduar

Immortalis (the reincarnation of Athanatoi) ventured into Ulduar25 for the first time last week, and I was there. Due to a lot of people already having done most of the fights on 10 man, we downed the bosses from the siege of Ulduar without much of a hassle. The sunday team got down the antechamber (I wasn't there) and yesterday we had a few attempts on Thorim and Freya (no kills sadly).
Still lots of fun, though.

Non-rogue stuff

I tanked some normal instances on my death knight and I quite enjoy it. She is now 74 and I'm hoping to have her ready to do heroics by 3.2
With the badge change, a lot of people will be wanting to do heroics for them, but they won't need the gear anymore - so I can tank for them, roll on all plate gear I want, and get badges of conquest while I'm at it.

Because my healer was a guildie with a fairly high level alt (77 is high for Nexus and UK) he was bored throughout most of the pulls and thus we upped the pace a bit.
Eventually he just kept pulling stuff himself, and I still managed to pick it up. It was chaotic, but fun! The first boss pull in UK was borderline suicidal (pulling the room and the boss with it) and a few of our PuGed DPS died (sorry guys) but the runs went smooth and quite fast otherwise.

Shared Topic: Awareness

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:43:00 +0000

[Reply to Blog Azeroth Shared Topic of June 22nd: 'Being aware of your surroundings during raids' as proposed by Lissanna] [src]

As a raid healer, a common thing these days is trying to balance keeping everyone in your raid alive, while still being able to move when you need to (ie. having the right amount of situational awareness to your surroundings during raids).

I thought it would be neat to see how all the classes (even tanks and DPS) handle the multi-tasking that is required during raids. Do tanks and DPS sometimes have tunnel vision and forget to watch for the AOE effects or whatever they need to move out of? How do other healers deal with avoiding the tunnel vision problem?

Interesting topic as usual, and I'll be giving my view as a rogue, but I'll also try to give some bear tank flavor to it to spice things up.

User Interface (UI)

Replying a bit later to this topic than usual I've had the chance to read up on some other replies to it (check the end of this post for links) and it seems everyone so far agrees that a good UI is important. The problem with this is of course that the concept 'good UI' is up to the player. Some people swear by the default UI, others change their UI mostly for the visual customization, others for the increased functionality, but often a mix of those.

Take for example my screenshot from the XT-002 fight. You can't really see the scrolling combat text that much (it's only showing a rupture tick after my death) but other that than it shows the most important stuff. You can see DBM warning me of Gravity Bomb and Light Bomb in the middle, with bars that stay into place to remind me of who has them, and you can see the Tantrum emote and the enemy cast bar (which is the Quartz mod) also warning me of that.

As you can see, the middle isn't all that cluttered and I have a pretty good view on the battle field (also note the effect of the camera distance macro allowing me to zoom out further - with thanks to Karthis of Of Teeth And Claws for sharing it back in the day). Granted, the scrolling combat text obstructs the sideview a little, but when tanking on my bear I set up a filter on my outgoing hits to only show stuff that didn't hit (e.g. a dodged Mangle or something).

DPS and 'the zone'

As Kahleena from Fel Deeds Awake! notes, DPS isn't always the facerolling people think it is. When you have a priority system to keep up your debuffs and DoTs and the boss, and there's a lot of stuff happening because the boss is trying to kill you, you need to multi-task and do both DPS and avoid damage.
The zone, then, is that matrix-like situation in which the world moves in slow motion (I'm not talking lag here, people) but you do everything at normal speed. You anticipate slice and dice is about to fall off. You feel the cooldown on Fear is almost over and you run away from doomfires before you are feared into them. You see that the timer on Light Bomb is almost over, and you get ready to cloak out of it should you get the next. The zone is the ultimate DPS state of mind.

As a tank, it works in the same way, but you have this predictive feeling where you can almost see the path adds are going to take. As a main tank, you're kind of limited even when in the zone, because you can't do much with a boss in your face.

DPS and tunnel vision

Often mistaken for 'the zone', tunnel vision is when you are paying so much attention to your skill priority ("oh god, slice and dice AND hunger for blood are about to fall off!") that you fail to notice your surroundings (your feet are on fire and you're not wearing the summer festival sandals) and you're taking damage that could easily be prevented. In the best case scenario, you're still causing healers to divert their attention to you when they could be doing something more useful. In the worst case scenario, they spend a lot of mana to try and save your behind and you still die.

As a tank, it's where you think you picked up all adds, but half of them are actually preparing healer soup with little bits of DPS.

Training awareness

The good news is you can train on getting in the zone. Just by practicing a lot on instances you can get better, of course, and the more you see a boss fight, the more you'll learn to predict scripted abilities etc.
For training your reaction to random abilities, PvP might prove to be interesting. Because the opponent is also controlled by human players, a lot of things are totally random. For example, a rogue can train in cloaking things by lurking around a group of opponents, killing one and getting away safely. This usually requires a fast combination of some form of CC (blind, gouge, KS ... you won't use these in PvE a lot but it's often necessary in PvP to have a chance in getting away) and a few things to get you into safety (cloak of shadows, vanish, sprint, not necessarily in that order).

Reader question(s)

So what about you? What does your UI look like? Are you often in the zone, or more often in the tunnel vision state? If you play multiple classes, do you lose focus easier on some classes than on the other ones?

Patch 3.2 PTR: first thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:24:00 +0000

(For the full 3.2 patch notes, check this link on MMOChampion)

Somebody set up us the bomb! ... I mean, this is quite the controversial patch so far.

PvP
* Arenas
o The newest season of Arena gear can only be purchased if you meet the requirements with your 3 or 5 player team rating. Rating requirements from 2 player teams can still be used to purchase the previous season of gear.

I suppose this is because they believe that 2v2 is too hard to really balance... but I think it's a bad idea if they wanted more participation in arenas.

PvP
* Battlegrounds
o Battleground experience has arrived!
+ Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included).
+ Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar - both located near the Battlemasters in either city - and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold.
+ Disabling experience gains will prevent a player from gaining experience through any means available in the game.
+ Players with experience gains turned off who compete in Battlegrounds will face off only against other players with experience gains turned off.
+ Behsten and Slahtz can reinstate experience gains for players, for a 10 gold fee of course. Any experience that would've been accumulated if experience gains were not turned off cannot be recovered.

So, one can now level purely by PvP (but I suspect the exp gain would be roughly the same as grinding mobs, e.g. questing will still be faster.) Pretty cool though. I've had times when I wanted to hop into a BG but didn't because I would lose out on leveling.

PvP
* Battlegrounds
o When standing at a capture point that you control, you will gain a buff called Honorable Defender. This buff grants +50% honor gained from kills. This currently affects Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm and Isle of Conquest.

This fixes the problem where defenders gained less honor than the HK farming idiots. Okay, you'll still get less honor if nobody actually comes to the node you're defending, but if that is the case, you're probably defending the wrong node :P

PvP
* Battlegrounds
o Arathi Basin
+ The time it requires to capture a base has been reduced to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds.
+ The game now ends when one team reaches 1600 victory points, down from 2000.
o Eye of the Storm
+ The time it requires to capture the center flag has been reduced to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds
+ The game now ends when one team reaches 1600 victory points, down from 2000.
o Strand of the Ancients
+ The faction starting on attack/defense will now be randomized at the start of each match.
o Warsong Gulch
+ There is a now a 20 minute timer on this battleground. After that time, the team with the most flag captures wins. If this would result in a tie, the team that captured the first flag wins. If neither side has captured a flag, then the game ends in a tie.

No more endless WSGs, and some sped-up ABs and EOTS. I guess it'll be a bit more bearable to farm Justicar/Conqueror now?

Items: General
#Emblem system changes
* Both the 10 and 25 player instances of the Crusaders' Coliseum drop a new Emblem of Triumph.
* Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism.
* The heroic dungeon daily quest will now reward 2 Emblems of Triumph and the normal daily dungeon quest will reward 1 Emblem of Triumph.

Whine topic of the day! Anyway, I guess it's nice - if the new dungeon coming with this patch is a step up from Ulduar, this'll get people geared a lot faster (including me - I'm behind a month and a half in gear).

i'll write up some more thoughts on other stuff in a later post.

Isle of Conquest: AV meets SOTA and Wintergrasp ?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:57:00 +0000

Okay, I'm not gonna quote the wall of text full of info on the new battleground, Isle of Conquest, that is coming up in the next major content patch. You can just read the source. Go ahead and read it, I'll wait.

Noticed this ?

Taking this resource garners precious reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it.

This is a bit like the mines in AV, but the honor part is new. That's a lot more of an incentive to hold the objectives, too.

Once onboard the airship, players will find it comes equipped with parachutes enabling a strike team to drop into the enemy keep from above.

Not really new as a mechanic, but nice to see it officially supported by Blizzard ;) If isle of Conquest should turn into a grindfest like AV, I know what I'll be doing.

It will be interesting to see how the vehicles fit into the battleground. If Isle of Conquest is to become a controlled (read: lag-free, more or less even numbers of players) Wintergrasp variant, this could be a lot of fun.

With Wintergrasp being so popular that they have to change daily quests into weekly quests, I see a chance for a very popular battleground that will usually be filled. And with the sides being even in numbers, it's a great alternative to Wintergrasp for those realms with an incredibly skewed Alliance to Horde ratio or low overall population, because a battlegroup should be able to provide plenty of players.

Off-topic: traffic
At the start of this month I noticed my google Analytics tracker wasn't installed properly and I had been tracking nothing at all since the start of this blog. I fixed it though, so I have two weeks of traffic reports now.
It reports 2541 visits and 3180 pageviews (a whopping 1633 of those were on my 'Gearing up for PvP' guide which Wow.com linked to in their Daily Quest column - that's the huge spike at the end). This was a lot more compared to the other time they linked to me (that was the post about having fun in PvP) which had about 93 pageviews. So yeah .. nice flow from there and I hope it helped a few people out :)

Gearing up for PvP

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:59:00 +0000

Note: thanks to my guildie Pharous for posting a similar post on the guild forums and inspiring me to write my own.

Now, this is not a chronological list, it just lists some options you can use to gear up, and how they rank compared to eachother. I'm assuming you have no arena rating or points.

Crafted Gear
The most basic gear here is the Eviscerator's Battlegear set. This is an eight-piece set with no sockets and a total of 350 resilience. However it's got a fair amount of stamina and it's not that expensive to get either. So buy the mats, find a leatherworker, give mats and tip, collect gear.

You can also supplement this set with some crafted jewelcrafting stuff (Emerald Choker, Scarlet Signet and Savage Titanium Ring or Titanium Impact Choker and Titanium Impact Band if you have more money to spend) and a crafted cape, the Frostguard Drape.

Regarding weapons, you can get a Titansteel Shanker crafted by a friendly blacksmith.

Emblems
You can trade Emblems of Heroism, Valor etc. for PvP gear. Emblems of Heroism give Savage Gladiator gear, which is a step up from the crafted set. I would recommend buying a Rolfsen's Ripper first, though.
Emblems of Valor get you Hateful Gladiator's Gear, which you can also buy for Honor. They are all the same iLvL as most of the Titan-forged gear from the Wintergrasp vendors.

Honor
Other than the Hateful set, you can also buy the Deadly non-set pieces for honor (that is, bracers, belt, boots, necklace and ring). The bracers and boots are better than the ones you can get through Wintergrasp, the belt is roughly the same.

You can also buy the Battlemaster's trinkets here (I chose Battlemaster's Conviction myself, but in retrospect I might've gone for the +crit one), and the Medallion of the Alliance/Horde, which you will definitly want unless you're Human.

Wintergrasp
Lots of PvP loot to be had here. The titan-forged helm and boots are on par with Hateful Gladiator gear, the belt and chest are on par with Deadly Gladiator gear. All of them are bought with Wintergrasp marks.

There is also an alternative to the medallion available, keeping the traditional trinket effect and replacing the resilience of the Medallion with another useful stat (crit/AP/haste/hit), a PvP version of the Mirror of Truth, and another trinket with passive resilience and an on-use AP or haste increase.

You can also buy some gems and enchants with Stone Keeper Shards. And a mammoth.

And last but not least, you can raid the Vault of Archavon for a chance at both PvE and PvP loot.

How to gear up
My guildie suggested this:

[STEP ONE]
(a) If you don't raid or you don't have any excess Emblems, get the crafted gear and go farm battlegrounds.
(b) If you do have Emblems to spend, do so. Just don't buy the chest.

[STEP TWO]
Grind honor and buy Hateful Glad pieces with them (but not the chest) until you have the 4 set bonus. Get the Belt and Boots from Wintergrasp Marks.

[STEP THREE]
Get the chest from Wintergrasp.

[STEP FOUR]
Get the bracers, two rings (Hateful and Deadly), necklace, cloak, and the Medallion for honor. Buy the cheapest things first.

Enjoy !

Digging up old screenshots

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:07:00 +0000

When I'm bored, I like to go dig up old screenshots in my WoW folder and rack up those old memories. The contrast between my early Horde days and what I am now is big ... and there are a lot of people on these screenshots that I miss.

It's odd, though. When I first started playing, I was on EU-Defias Brotherhood (RP-PvP) and I mostly RP'd. In fact I was so focused on roleplaying that I didn't really get on with leveling. The highest character I got on that server is a lv 47 Troll hunter. It's not that I sucked at leveling, but there was always RP to be found, and I rarely chose leveling over RP.

Then I rolled Alliance on an RP server and I consider myself a raiding/PvP hybrid player. I'm not even interested in RP anymore (unless I'm in a really poetic mood maybe). And it's kind of hard getting both of those things done on this server, because we are one of the lowest ranked realms on the raiding progress list (#239 of 255 on wowprogress, I would guess the only ones behind us are newer realms) and our battlegroup isn't exactly balanced either as I said before.

Anyway, some of these things are memories that will stick for a very long time.
Stuff like massive RP guild meets, or doing stealth runs with a few druids and a rogue, epic tanking moments (misclicking and getting shifted out of bearform as Azgalor hits me ... err bad example.). The opening of AQ. A lv 1 Hogger raid.

I also found some even older screenshots in my Fraps folder. Terribly old screens, because they're not even from WoW - they are Guild Wars screens. Screens of my lv 10 elementalist, with a christmas hat, watching the new years fireworks in a city I can't even remember the name of.

I'll leave you with a GM chatlog that I found on these screenshots ...

Unmercey 7 and other rogue videos

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:45:00 +0000

I watched Unmercey 7, which Rogue-Rogue linked to in their latest blog entry.

The subtitle of the video (Unmercey 7: Hana) confused me at first. I figured it referred to the flower in the description image, because 'hana' is 'flower' in Japanese. The problem with this is that Unmercey is a Chinese player, not Japanese, so it didn't make sense - it should have been 'huā' (I have no idea what tone it is in Modern Chinese - I just know it is this one in archaic Chinese .. go figure). Turns out it was reference to the last song in the movie, which was a JPop song. Ah well.

Anyway. The video featured some refreshing Shadow Dance spec footage. Assuming the players he duels have a decent amount of resilience, he is still getting 5K ambushes off, which I found fairly suprising. With the (justified) nerf to Overkill and our burst as Muti/Prep, perhaps the more burst-biased people might spec Shadow Dance.

This Sub spec also has shadowstep for increased mobility (though I do wonder if it weighs up against Fleetfooted). I must admit I preferred some of Unmercey's earlier videos: Unmercey 5 & 6 both showcased some very creative moves like FoK-Vanish-Sap to flush out stealthers.

This movie didn't showcase that many new moves, but it did prove that a subtlety build can be just as viable in the right hands (and with the right amount of keybinding, no doubt).

There's some other good rogue movies out there as well. Akrios from Rogue-rogue has some neat ones (though I think the only up to date ones are a few random arena footage ones) and Krymu is also a popular name in the rogue movie scene.

Meanwhile I am still stuck with exams. I passed my archaic Chinese exam yesterday, and the next one is friday: business economics. I'm doing some 'when I get back' planning for WoW, but I'm running out of ideas since my armory isn't up-to-date and I can't remember my PvE gear that well anymore (especially enchanting and gem choices are foggy)

Shared Topic: Healers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:30:00 +0000

[Reply to Blog Azeroth Shared Topic of June 8th: Non-healers views of healers as proposed by Nigiri] [src]

I would love to read blogger's thoughts on who they like to have heal them. Would you prefer a Holy priest of a Disc priest? A Holy pally or a Resto druid. Shammy maybe?

This depends on some things in my opinion. I don't think I really have a particular choice.
The role
I find I'm not that aware of my healers anymore since my transition from tanking to DPS (as you know I played a druid tank in TBC). When I was tanking, I had a good idea of who was keeping me up. You know when there's a lifebloom rolling on you because of that constant green stream in scrolling combat text, and the bigger heals from the other classes stand out because of that.
As melee DPS much of the damage done to me can be avoided by paying attention. A heal will come sooner or later, but if I can help it I might not need one right away.
I guess I depend less on the healers as a DPS.

The place
In five mans, you usually take one healer only. Here is where you will really feel if your healer is paying attention to you. It's very fun as a tank to chainpull and test yourself and the healer. However, I have found out that DPS casualties are sometimes a result of this hehe. In 25 mans there is usually a healer for 'raid healing', so you will probably get a heal thrown your way.
The particular boss fight is also an important factor: if a healer or two is enough to keep up the main tank, than the rest can concentrate more on keeping DPS alive.

The healers
From a tank point of view, if you group with your healers a lot you know what they are capable of healing you through (sometimes they can pull off amazing things) and they know what you can take if you have your cooldowns.
From a DPS point of view you can't really expect them to keep track of all your cooldowns (I very much doubt if a healer knows if I used CloS recently or not).

As a bear tank, if I would really have to choose a class to keep me up I would say paladins. It's kind of hard to explain why -it doesn't help that it's been a while since I've tanked- but I suppose in my opinion, the flash of light stream of heals fit the dodged/non-dodged style of incoming attacks for a bear.

As a DPS, I think it's really nice to have a tree druid on raid healing duty. A HoT feels very secure for some reason - like you are safe for the time being, as long as that HoT is rolling. The fact that they can also use Swiftmend to turn that HoT into an instant heal when needed just adds extra security.

The tanks
Say what? Yes. A good tank should be able to safeguard the DPS from a lot of damage (think picking up adds quickly and such). With a bad tank your healers will have to work harder. With a good tank (and we have those, I hope you do too) you are safe to DPS to your hearth's content, and an occasional heal will keep you up.

Special mention: PvP
It's always awesome when a player decides to heal in PvP. Here, there is that tank-and-healer-like connection between you and your healer, because often, you are the one 'tanking' the opponent regardless of your class. This is also a nice opportunity to see how a healer performs under extreme pressure: bosses do not make intelligent decisions. A boss will never try to lock down a healer while luring the tank out of line of sight of that healer. A boss will not alternate an immunity CC (like cyclone) between you and your healer so you cannot be healed.

Shared Topic: Favorite Quest

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:34:00 +0000

[Reply to Blog Azeroth Shared Topic of June 1st: Deconstruct your favourite quest/zone as proposed by Spinks] [src]

The first part was deciding what quest or zone. I decided I'd go for a quest, because there is not really a particular zone I like, though there are some I have fond memories of (for example, Netherwing dailies in Shadowmoon Valley).

In the end I managed to choose to pick one that has stuck to me for several reasons which I will explain below. The chain in question is the famed Cipher of Damnation questchain in Shadowmoon Valley, which also happens to be the start for the attunement process for Serpentshrine Cavern. Do not read this if you haven't done this questline, because it contains heavy spoilers.

The start
The chain starts off when a member of the Earthern Ring redirects you to Earthmender Torlok in Shadowmoon Valley. Nature in this zone doesn't look too well (it's all dead and there's green lava and such) and you are sent on three quests to commune with the spirits. Anyway, having done that, you learn about a spell that may have caused the current look of Shadowmoon Valley, and you are sent to seek out Oronok Torn-heart, a scruffy looking orc hermit.

Oronok and his sons
Oronok puts you to the test by having you kill some things in the neighborhood of his place, and then he reveals you his story. He tells you:

"They [the words of the spell - red.] are know as the Cipher of Damnation: The words uttered by Gul'dan himself to shatter this land. The very spell that severed the last remaining tie the orcs had with the elements of Draenor."

He then asks you to go search for his sons around Shadowmoon Valley. All three of them have some chores for you, and all three will eventually (after a quest or three each) give you a fragment of the cipher of damnation.

The grand finale
With the cipher recovered, you head back to Oronok and are asked to go summon an elite you have to kill with a group. The place of summoning is an altar in memory of Gul'dan, at the base of the volcano known as the Hand of Gul'dan. The spirit of Gul'dan can be found here, as well as some other shaman spirits. When you read the spell aloud (you may recognize it from the Black Temple trailer) your screen shakes heavily, and the lava in front of you starts to develop smoke.

In the smoke, Cyrukh the Firelord spawns, with one of my favorite game quotes I might add:

Little creature made of flesh, your wish has been granted. Death comes for you!

And as you can see, he's one big, mean chunk of rock. I have very fond memories of this guy, because on my druid, I have tried every role on him. I originally did him as a balance druid. I have screens of this, and two of the randomly PuGed people would later end up in the same guild as me.
Later in my WoW career I would come back to help guildies and throw some heals, and even later I would be helping out by tanking him.

The reward is a nice blue item and a fire resistance necklace, but the special effects, including all sons and Oronok flying in to help out, and the effect of 'casting' the cipher, make this a very cool quest IMO.

Honorable mention: Dragonmaw Races
I should point out that I really liked the Dragonmaw races you can do for Netherwing rep. While I never beat Captain Skyshatter, I did defeat Mulverick and it was a fun and fresh concept. Learning the path he races and then trying to stay either ahead of him or right behind him made a very adrenaline-packed type of quest. Anyone remember that sharp dive on the north-eastern edge of the Netherwing Ledge ? He dives behind a ledge there and then 'pulls up' so you're right in his line of fire if you don't watch out.

As a sidenote I'd really appreciate some input on the layout. I got tired of the pitch-black feeling of the previous one, so I adjusted one of the basic blogger templates a bit so it matched my new header.

Adjusting layout

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:25:00 +0000

Don't panic if things look awful, I'm working on it.
Patience is a virtue of a good rogue !

EU PvP forums up in arms

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:22:00 +0000

There was a fairly important announcement last week for us EU PvPers: the long-awaited cross-language battlegroups were being implemented.

For those who are unaware of this feature, it basicly means that for example a group of Alliance consisting of French servers may be pitted against a group of Horde players from Spanish servers. A common misconception is that players from these servers with an other language will be mixed with the English servers, which is not the case.

Anyway, the goal of course is to decrease queues. There may not be enough English-speaking Alliance out there for you to smash, but perhaps there's a whole bunch of French Alliance queueing. So yeah, nice find.

Except not all battlegroups are being merged.

Battlegroups that will not be merged
English – Blackout, Misery and Vindication
German - Blutdurst
Russian - Шквал (Flurry) and Вихрь (Whirlwind)

In a suprising twist, six battlegroups are not being merged, for unknown reasons.
Blackout, Misery and Blutdurst are all big battlegroups. Vindication and the two Russian ones aren't.

Now, being from Vindication myself, I was quite suprised with this. The view I have of the battlegroup is a fairly low activity battlegroup, with an overrepresentation of Horde. I have instant queues, but I bet the Horde doesn't - from what I hear they can vary between 30 mins - an hour and a half.

A possible explanation for not merging the Russian battlegroups could be due to cyrillic characters posing a problem. Perhaps they don't want English/French/German/Spanish players to have to try and pronounce a Russian player's name over Vent, or something. Still sounds like a bit of a dumb excuse.

Others are bringing up technical limits due to the physical location of the battlegroup servers, but I don't buy that, and I hope we will get a proper answer soon.

Big Hit Box Guest Post

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 31 May 2009 13:51:00 +0000

I finally got off my lazy ass and tried to write up something for BigHitBox, the melee blog I've talked about before.

So without further ado, a link to the post: Being up close and personal @ BigHitBox.com

I've also messed a bit with the rogue blog links to make sure all blogs there are up to date.

Fun things to do in PvP

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 31 May 2009 11:40:00 +0000

As a rogue, we are one of the two stealth classes, and this gives us a huge advantage in PvP - it allows us to pick our targets and go unseen where others cannot go. Here's some fun things you can try in PvP as a rogue (not all of them involve stealth).

Parachuting into Wintergrasp
Granted, everyone can do this, but none can do it as well as we can. Go to the southern part of Icecrown and fly into the mountains overlooking Wintergrasp Fortress. When the battle starts, fly in. As you know, Wintergrasp is a no-fly zone and you'll be automatically dismounted soon. An added bonus for us, rogues, is that we can stealth as soon as we are auto-dismounted. Unless people saw you fly over, they'll never know you're there. Now is a good time to go destroy some cannons on a more quiet side of the fortress, or you can lurk around and kill players trying to man them.

Defend a healer
You should always love your healers, especially in PvP. Defending one to the death can be a real pain for your opponents. An added bonus could be that the healer remembers you if you are both in battlegrounds on a regular basis. With many tricks up our sleeve and a bit of help from the healer, the two of you can wreck havoc on the other team.

Harass a healer
On the other hand, healers on the opposing team should be harassed and/or killed. A well-geared healer you may not be able to kill on your own, but that doesn't mean you can't keep him busy. Interrupt his heals, blind him if he's not being attacked, stun him, slow his movement and casts, ... If you can catch him out of combat, vanish and sap him. If you can't kill him but can do a fair amount of damage to him, keep pressuring him. If he's busy keeping himself alive, he's doing less healing to his group mates.

Make someone paranoid
Doesn't always work, but very fun if it does. Using distract and sap from maximum distance, you can make people try to locate you by spamming AoE or the likes. You can use this to stall people traveling to a nearby node or something, for example.
Just make sure they don't destealth you ! You can also do a 'fake' attack to keep them busy: after a few distracts and a sap or two, go in for the kill, apply some bleeds etc, and vanish (unless they're an easy kill, just kill them then). Wait until they try to heal up and attack again. This is mostly a tip for when there's opponents around that you can't kill 1v1, though.

Stalling the enemy in WSG
Your group managed to grab the enemy flag and is trying to bring it home? Bring some crippling poison and go to town with Fan of Knives on the enemy chasing your flag carrier. This is also nice when there's a group of defenders in the enemy flag room - just hop in and FoK a few times to slow most of them.
Of course, for the really persistent chasers out there, a stun or a blind will usually stop them dead in their tracks.

Is there anything you like to do in PvP that I might not have thought of ?