This lead to a very amusing thread where people found a variety of words that were innocuous but blocked due to substring matches.

In that vein, here is a wonderful article on the general futility of trying to censor on-line communications to make them guaranteed kid-safe. The subject of this blog post is what a 14-year-old boy was able to make in a handful of minutes when given access to a believed-safe prototype system.

The Untold History of Toontown’s SpeedChat (or BlockChattm from Disney finally arrives)

Valithria Dreamwalker (PTR v 0.1)

Not only is it a good strategy, but he also wrote some very good tips for the different roles (caster, melee, healer, tank) that make it even clearer what to expect.

Thanks, Bluedeep and CUTIES ONLY!

It was an Anub engage where one wipe would bump them down to the next tribute chest level — so killing him right then was very critical. Unfortunately, at 40%, while trying to promote someone else to raidleader, the raidleader accidentally kicked the main tank from the raid.

While they killed him on the next run, that was still the wipe that counted since they lost that tribute chest level.

I admit, that was both the most tragic and the most comic wipe story I had ever heard — I wish I had one to top it but I don’t.

What’s your best wipe story?

Curse: Twin Val’kyr Shield Monitor

Another very very detailed strategy from Firstaidspec, including tips for every role in the raid: Sindragosa v1.0 (PTR)

And a nice video from Veyril: Cuties Only Icecrown Citadel PTR 25 HQ Sindragosa PTR

Update: Kal, who blogs about tanks at WoWThinkTank, commented on this at:

ThinkTank: [General, Druid] Icewell radiance, bears, and you

His summary:

my conclusion is similar to yours: this should favor tanks with higher health/armor more. In some situation – for example, in a fight like Brutallus 2.0 where you could take 4 hits within 1.5 seconds that could kill a tank, tanks with higher avoidance will have a better chance of being ‘lucky’ and surviving (about 20% vs 10%) but it won’t change healing patterns; both tanks would have to be healed the same way, and it’s very likely that superior bear health will allow bears to take an additional hit where other tanks cannot.

His article is definitely worth clicking through and reading though, he goes into good detail. Thanks Kal!

The Blizzard post is now below the cut since this article has gotten long.

Daelo: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid’s main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.

Why are we doing this?

The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more “spiky” than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn’t avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.

We’ve been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There’s a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we’ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again.

We’ll have this on the PTR soon so players can see the effects inside Icecrown Raid.

First off, one of the most amusing Anub videos I’ve seen from Brakthir of Phantom Elite. It’s a good Anub kill video in general, but the 8 minute mark is definitely worth watching through to the end, as it may not be clean but it’s effective! Anub First Kill – Full Wipe

Also, Ringuh of Lotto has post their Anub strategy: Anub’arak 25 Hardmode

And you can see it in action on their video: Anub’arak 25 hardmode by Lotto

And he’s also posted their Twins strategy (aka the “SR” strat, which works well if you’re struggling with the strats in many of the videos out there): Twin Val’kyrs 25 hardmode

In his own words:

Do your healers and ranged fail with soaking too bad so you cant copy the more usual strategies from Paragon / whatever other guild released video. Well dont worry.. so did ours.

We didn’t manage to kill twins on the first reset. We got it several times to 20% or so but every time things fucked up at the same thing – too much shit got through the soakers and hit the raid.

Then we came up with this and havent had any issues since.

Read the Blood Legion strategy: Festergut v2.0 (PTR)

Watch the CUTIES ONLY video: CUTIES ONLY Festergut PTR 10-man

Remember the site is still beta. Feel free to send me feedback: kyth.fusion@gmail.com, a PM on the forums here or on Fusion’s site, or send me a PM on the new site.

If you would like to write strategies, check out: Contribute to StratFu

My last three days have been beating a particular ‘bug’ on the new site into submission, and last night I spent the whole night dreaming about dealing with divs clearing various columns.

Brubaker, our warlock star-killer, wrote up what we do to handle stars on Algalon:

StratFu: Algalon Star-Killing