Tuesday Morning Post: Valorous edition
by Daniel Whitcomb 
Mar 22nd 2011 at 5:00AM
If you're not big into the whole heroic-running game, there's plenty of other interesting stuff to catch up on, including some new WoW insights our team dragged out of PAX East 2011. With scheduled realm maintenance lasting from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time, you should have plenty of time to read it all.
Hot news and features
- Two Bosses Enter is back!
- Check out the patch 4.1 PTR patch note updates for March 15.
- Check out the latest patch 4.0.6 hotfixes for March 16.
- Patch 4.1 will bring with it new archaeology items.
- New PTR quests may point to the origin of the rumored caster legendary.
- Midsummer Fire Festival gear will be getting an upgrade with the new patch.
- Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has a few words on raid progression.
- The winners of Blizzard's global writing contest have been announced.
- Our PAX East 2011 team has a report on the Law in Games panel and how it applies to WoW.
- Our PAX East team also took away some insights about whether or not WoW will go free-to-play any time soon.
- We review the WoW TCG's newest raid deck, Assault on Icecrown Citadel.
- The latest RSA security hack should not affect Blizzard authenticators.
Class news and guides
- Shifting Perspectives looks at some druid news from the patch 4.1 PTR. We also have a look at balance druid stats and at feral cat raiding strategies.
- Spiritual Guidance has an analysis of Mind Sear on the patch 4.1 PTR and a guide to healing Maloriak and Nefarian.
- Encrypted Text helps you customize Power Auras for your rogue.
- The Light And How To Swing It has a guide to retribution paladin macros. We also have a guide to gearing your tank paladin for heroics and an interview with Diamondtear of Paragon.
- Lichborne takes a look at tier 11 death knight tank gear.
- Totem Talk has some thoughts on the new Spirit Link Totem for restoration. We also have a guide to using addons to perfect your enhancement DPS rotation.
- The Care And Feeding of Warriors has part 1 of a guide to Cataclysm tanking.
- Scattered Shots sets the record straight on pet happiness.
- Arcane Brilliance has a few complaints about the arcane tree.
- Raid Rx has a guide to healing Blackwing Descent.
- Blood Pact continues to stay alive.
Dungeons, items, professions, PvP, and more
- Gold Capped examines the market for enchantments for Bind on Account gear.
- WoW Rookie wants to know if you're ready to raid.
- Ready Check offers an apologia for the difficulty of ranged DPSing.
- The OverAchiever helps you get the Grey Riding Camel.
- Addon spotlight helps you avoid those embarrassing reputation gaps with Auto Tabard.
Odds and ends
- Check out the latest installment of Safe Passage.
- Know Your Lore looks at the events of the Interbellum and at everyone's favorite WoW Mary Sue other than Thrall, Rhonin.
- 15 Minutes of Fame speaks to a WoW-playing English class.
- World of Warcrafts revisits the WoW Soundtrack Project.
- The Lawbringer discusses more new strategies for the fight against gold selling.
Filed under: Realm Status, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Zalvi24 Mar 22nd 2011 5:40AM
this is the earliest Tuesday morning post
Saeadame Mar 22nd 2011 6:30AM
This is indeed a very early Tuesday Morning post. It's only 4:30 am here. Oh, I guess I should go to sleep soon...
ENOUGH! Mar 22nd 2011 1:06PM
This is another outstanding example of Blizz doing to little too late.
Player activity is at or below the level it was pre-expansion where not many were raiding because they had done it all.
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyactivity.php?serverid=-1
Blizz seriously borked the game, and this little change is something I guess that in their mind makes it better.
According to the player activity chart above, there might be more player activity if Cata wasn't released.
What were the big changes in Cata?
Classes, classes that played well and had multiple viable specs after years of tuning, suddenly were crappy again.
Healers, which were always a rare raid resource were worked over to the point that many long time healers quit, sitting more raiders on the bench as guilds that used to run 25 found they only had heals for 1 or 2 10s.
The first level of post expansion raid gearing is more of a grind than in the past and the difficulty of the first level raid content is more difficult than it has been in years. This is the reason CutiesOnly gave for disbanding.
Based on player activity, Cata is a big massive FLOP. The chart above says it all.
Blizz better come to their senses and realize that they need to make a game that the players want to continue to play, as opposed to stroking the devs egos based on how many ways they can think of to change the game.
ENOUGH! Mar 22nd 2011 3:16PM
I'll go on the record now, for if cataclysm does indeed kill WoW, this is how I think it went down...
Bosses used to be tuned on DPS vs. enrage. There were some exceptions to this, sometimes quality of heals was paramount in an encounter. These were the heal checks, and they were rare.
One day, a bored person with some clout at Blizzard, probably said something like "Gee I'm tired of tuning encounters based on DPS, let's tune them on healers mana instead.", "That sounds interesting, let's do it"
Now, it took a special type of person to want to raid heal in the past. A care bear type of person, and I don't mean that in a mean way at all. A person who was willing to play whack-a-mole healing in raids.
Now on top of all that, the new cataclysm raid tuning required most healers, most of the time to use only their most resource conserving spell in order to not go out of mana before the fight was over.
That was the last straw for many healers, who already had a stressful, not very much liked job in raiding.
Here is where the butterfly effect comes into play. A small change in one place results in a larger change somewhere else...
What happens if you lose oh let's say half of the healers in WoW? You lose maybe 3 in a guild that had 5 or 6? You end up sitting 5 to 15 other players who want to raid who can't now because there are not enough healers to heal them. In the aggregate maybe half of all raiders who want to raid, used to raid, can't raid anymore.
Small change, big consequences.
Some developer got bored, thought they would do things in a new way to keep their life interesting...result, death of WoW.
Think I'm overstating the problem? Take another look at that chart above. Or go to mmorpg.com, WoW used to be at the top of the list of rated MMOs, now it's easier to find it in the list using search.
ENOUGH! Mar 22nd 2011 5:51PM
Did some more poking around, googled cataclysm healer shortage...
This exact problem was predicted almost a year ago, see "Healer and Tank changes" about half way down.
http://esc-hatch.blogspot.com/2010/04/cataclysm-class-population-or-world-of.html
Artemisian Mar 22nd 2011 8:54PM
As a 352 ilvl healer doing normal 10s and 25s, I refute your statement of fights depending on healer mana. I'm yet to see a wipe due to lack of mana from healers - if this happens, it's because various people have made strat errors and we've had to pick up the slack.
So less QQ please.
Fletcher Mar 22nd 2011 6:59AM
And here it just became Wednesday. But judging by the timestamps it was indeed posted on Tuesday.
Shela Monster Mar 22nd 2011 7:00AM
I am very much looking forward to the new Valor Points system.
As a casual player, I enjoy my Heroics and older raids, but I'm not in progression.
So this gives me some joy knowing I can get gear while grinding away at other lesser things.
(Such as doing Loremaster all over again!)
In other news, with Frost DKs getting 2 permanent Death Runes, does that mean the 4 piece from the T11 bonus is always in effect?
O_o
I'm not sure if Lichborne or anyone else has info on this...
Meatwadz Mar 22nd 2011 11:58AM
A big benefit of the new point system is that we will see faster queue times as dps/heals on the days that tanks do their big heroic grind. The unfortunate part is that by the end of the week, no tanks may feel the need to continue to queue whatsoever.
gatlin46 Mar 22nd 2011 7:07AM
is there any way to keep players from blocking mail boxes. or make major cities a not fly zone, you cant get to most of the npc because of peple blocking them, this take a lot of time to work around(mostly in sw). thank-you
Paingiver-Shu'halo
Aaron Mar 22nd 2011 7:46AM
Go to the honor vendors in Old Town of SW they have collision detection to prevent people from stacking on top of them. Not sure if Blizz plans on doing this all over the place but it's a HUGE step in the right direction. =D
Alantu Mar 22nd 2011 7:55AM
For NPCs: Enable your nameplates and bind the "Interact with target" function to something handy.
For mailboxes: Travel 50 feet to find a different one.
Aaron Mar 22nd 2011 8:33AM
And do Dal fishing dailies to stack http://www.wowhead.com/item=44228
Noselacri Mar 22nd 2011 9:05AM
@Aaron
Cooking dailies. Fishing dailies will just net you junk for gold.
Meatwadz Mar 22nd 2011 12:04PM
Remember the Tol Barad bridge days? In org, you could both fly inside the building with the honor vendors as well as stack on top of them. I, along with many others, offered the suggestion on the wow forums to disable flying in the building and set clipping boundaries around the NPCs. Not more than a week later Blizz did exactly this. I would suggest you make suggestions on the forums and when enough people voice their opinion that it seems like a legitimate concern, Blizz will address it. Although, I do believe they already addressed the mailbox concern with "There are lots. Find a different one kthanks."