Posts with tag Karazhan

As an obsessive a big fan of battle pets, I was looking forward to everything patch 5.3 had to offer. Tons of battle pet changes, and the slew of new pets for the Raiding With Leashes II: Attunement Edition all had me especially excited. I zipped through The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern hunting for the new pets, and emerged victorious with one. Huzzah! But on my way to Karazhan, I realized I'd need to solo the Chess Event to get to Prince Malchezaar, who also drops a pet.

I wiped a few times, but things turned around once I read through an excellent Chess Event soloing guide from WoW blogger Tikari of Tikari's Tricks of the Trade.

Keep in mind that even with a great plan, the Chess Event is still plagued with RNG issues. But knowing what to expect will hopefully keep your rage at bay.

Tikari lays out a simple set of moves -- with diagrams -- and priorities to give your king the best chance of surviving, which is the main goal. The event was nerfed to increase the delay between enemy moves, but keep a few tips in mind.

• Move your king, and queen if you can, out of the fire immediately. Fire isn't a buff!
• Attack the enemy king with your queen, using the Rain of Fire/Poison Cloud ability. Be sure to target the enemy king with the queen's main attack.
• The Clerics seem to heal the enemy king more than I remember, but I kept them distracted with other pieces.
• Medivh doesn't cheat as quickly as he did before, so you'll have time for about four moves before he does so the first time around. Be sure to at least give your king, ideally your queen as well, space to move. I was able to win in the end by moving backward out of fire, drawing the enemy king into it.

Good luck and be sure to check out Tikari's guide for all the details!

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I no longer remember the exact boss or who was raiding with me, but I do clearly remember having a conversation with a friend while I was healing Karazhan. At the time, I was grumbling that I didn't think we had the right group composition to do an encounter successfully -- but it was only after the group's other healer died that my friend agreed. Of course it was then that I decided this wasn't going be a wipe -- something I hadn't thought was possible until just then. (Certainly no one was more surprised than I was when I pulled it off.)

Whether raiding or not, we all have close calls in game -- that was only one of many I've had. But it was certainly memorable. So what about you, dear readers? Share your stories, your near-misses, your especially memorable almost-but-not-quite deaths.

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The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

So the other day on Twitter someone asked me "Why were we in Karazhan, anyway" and since it's a question I've been asked before, I thought I'd address it. The primary reason we went to Karazhan was to kill a whole lot of guilds that were trying to transition to 25 man raiding from the 40 man of Classic by forcing them to run a 10 man instance and two 25 man instances at the same time. Ha. I kid, because I'm still bitter.

The question can actually be answered in several ways. We went to Karazhan because the Kirin Tor were investigating the tower and asked Khadgar for help. They had noticed that, decades after Medivh's death, some new malevolent force was infesting the tower (and since it sits on a ley line nexus, that concerned them) and as we investigated we discover the horrible truth. The Burning Legion has infested Karazhan and seeks control over the powerful arcane secrets held within, and they must be stopped.

But why did Prince Malchezaar lead his Legion forces to Karazhan in the first place? Well, for that, we have to talk about Medivh.

Lolegolas slapped a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. Throgg failed to restrain the same urge but his mirth emerged as uncontrollable giggles.

"What?" roared the Lil' Bad Wolf. "You dare mock me? Tremble before my mighty claws!"

"You're just so cute!" Lolegolas responded.

"Run away, little girl!" the diminuitive worgen pronounced. Its fierce claws would be frightening if it came up to anyone's knees. "Run away!"

"Okay, I give up, Throgg," the blood elf said. "Where'd you get him?"

"Karazhan," the orc responded. "It came with the Spiky Collar."

"What are you naming it?" the blood elf asked.

"Rose."

"Of course," he responded. "Who's a lil' bad wolf? Who's a lil' bad wolf?"

'Little elf, don't taunt the miniature worgen."

"Why?" Lolegolas asked. "Can it hurt me?"

"No, it's just tacky."

Item Note: The Lil' Bad Wolf is taught by the Spiky Collar which drops from the Big Bad Wolf in Karazhan, once patch 5.3 rolls out.

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Phat Loot Phriday brings you the scoop on some of the most ... interesting ... loot in the World of Warcraft, often viewed through the eyes of the stalwart Throgg and indelible Lolegolas. Suggest items you think we should feature by emailing mikeg@wowinsider.com.

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I was reading through some links while writing a follow-up to Robert's Not-So-Original WoW Miscellany when I happened across some discussions concerning the game's most agonizing trash. This is a popular subject for players, not least because complaining is a lot of fun, but I don't think anyone's going to argue that there haven't been some legitimately unpleasant trash clears in WoW.

Fortunately, most of the really bad trash clears are a distant memory, but there was at least one recent one that almost everyone who raided Dragon Soul could agree on. I'm going to include both dungeons and raids here, mostly because Shattered Halls was among the first things to go on this list. After including that, I knew there were other, equally nightmarish 5-mans that had to be included in the interest of fairness.

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

Keys in WoW have come in many forms. Some hang around our neck. Some hide in belts. Others open aircraft hangars or other, very special places. Some let us pretend to be rogues. Some never made it to the live game. Some we eat or play with. Some help us get the mail or reach new heights. We find some in unexpected places. A few are just trash.

This column is not about those keys. This is about the keys that used to be a Big Deal. The keys that people went to extraordinary lengths to obtain. The keys that put you on everyone's friends list. The keys to content.

Literal gates

Today, content is rarely locked. Players take it for granted that when a new dungeon or raid goes live, they will have immediate access. For the first half of WoW's history, however, this was not the case at all.

Vanilla WoW locked away virtually all of its end-game content. Raids required attunement, which means that every single person in your raid had to complete a certain quest line.

Keys worked differently. Content that required a key wasn't gated according to some arbitrary release schedule, such as the Heart of Fear -- but by actual gates.

People disagree a lot as to what WoW's best raids have been, not least because it's tough to evaluate how "good" a raid was until after some time has passed. For example, an MMO Champion forum poll a few months ago selected Icecrown Citadel as the game's best "final raid," and yet, I remember lots of players complaining that it hadn't been anywhere near as good as Black Temple a the time. You also have to wonder about the extent to which accessibility plays a role. Most people who saw Sunwell at level 70 loved it, but that wasn't a lot of people.

Anyway, three of the most frequently cited "best raids" of WoW are Karazhan, Black Temple, and Ulduar. I thought it might be worthwhile to ask -- what made them so good?

• Iconic drops or rewards Many of the drops from these places are instantly recognizable. Everybody wanted the "squid staff" off Illhoof and the Nightbane shield, and you can't swing a dead cat in trade chat without hitting another Black Temple transmog run. Even Ulduar, in the age of gear consolidation, had memorable drops.
• Atmosphere Karazhan was essentially an overgrown haunted house. Black Temple was a fortress full of Broken that would be hostile until you set Akama's soul free, with the brooding Illidan perched on top. Ulduar was an exceptionally beautiful fortress concealing its true purpose as a prison.
• At least one unexpected encounter You couldn't beat Kara without besting Medivh's ghost at chess, Illidan was one of WoW's most inventive fights, and, as nightmarishly difficult as it was, I still cherish my guild's first Yogg-0 kill.

What made something WoW's "best raid" for you? What mechanics or features would you most like to see repeated in a future raid?

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I have never forgotten how annoying it was to tank content I outgeared back in The Burning Crusade.

For everyone else, going back to older content was a delightful romp, a chance to flex one's digital muscles and unleash the power gained through gearing up. For a tank, it was often an excuse in taking off pieces of armor in order to lower your chances of dodging or otherwise avoiding damage so that you could generate enough rage (or take enough damage that you could get healed in the case of prot paladins), because if you went in your full raid gear, you could forget about generating any kind of threat whatsoever.

I remember the day we were getting two people through the lengthy Karazhan attunement quests, which meant I had to tank Steam Vault, Shadow Labyrinth and the Arcatraz. This meant I was going pantsless the whole time.

Honestly, one of the joys of being a bitter, cynical, grumpy ol' guy is that I remember every single annoyance I endured during The Burning Crusade. Not only am I not wearing rose-colored glasses, the second they start to form on my brow, I whip them off, stomping up and down and them while screaming no pants no pants never any pants no pants and then I alternate between demented laughter and hideous shrieking wails of agony. Well, or I just smirk. One of those.

How about you? What mechanical change have you enjoyed the most in recent expansions?

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

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I started playing World of Warcraft with no real idea of the Warcraft universe. I'd played a lot of RPGs, but I wasn't a big RTS player and I was generally more into tabletop play. My gateway drugs for the MMO genre were games like Planescape: Torment. (Man, I loved Planescape.)

As a result, my first time through the game, I barely paid attention to what I was doing, who I was fighting or why. It wasn't until I got to Molten Core that I started really thinking about what was going on. How did Thaurissan summon Ragnaros when he clearly had not intended to, and what was the Firelord up to? At the time, Ragnaros seemed astonishing to me, an entity of pure fire older than the whole world. The war between his Dark Iron servants and the dragons and orcs atop the Blackrock Spire became a central part of my game as I moved on to Blackwing Lair. I started paying a lot more attention to the dungeons and quests I was running.

Once we hit Outland and I got to Shadowmoon Valley, I ran the Cipher of Damnation quest line (a quest that is all I could hope for in a long quest chain, frankly), and the end of that quest line raised so many questions that I often point to it as the beginning of my lore nerd status.

What is the Cipher of Damnation? If it's the spell Kil'jaeden taught to Gul'dan that he used to raise the Hand of Gul'dan and sever the connection between the orcs and the elements, it's clearly not all it can do. Since using it summons Cyrukh the Firelord and since Oronok Torn-heart says it has been used "in the history of our worlds," I am now convinced that the Cipher is the spell that Thaurissan used to summon Ragnaros. But where did he learn it? It was also the spell Kael'thas used to try and summon Kil'jaeden through the Sunwell, which continued past Kael's death in Magister's Terrace.

With the release of the Raid Finder and the recent changes to valor points, the debate about 10- vs. 25-man raiding, which is harder to run, and which is harder to balance rages on. I have friends on both sides of the 10/25 debate. I understand both points of view, and I think both are utterly wrong. Completely, absolutely wrong. The issue to me is when we went from 40-man raids down to the current raid sizes, the decision to offer 25-man raids didn't really work. I think we should have gone to 10- and 20-man raiding at the dawn of The Burning Crusade, and I still think we should.

We had 20-man raids back in classic WoW -- two of them, in fact, Zul'Gurub and Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. Neither exists as a 20-man raid any more, so this may seem odd to players who didn't raid then, but these were considered the small raids. People who had just spent hours raiding in Molten Core, Blackwing Lair or AQ40 would put together these runs on the fly to gear their alts or get a shot at off-spec loot, while other guilds that didn't have the numbers for 40-man raids would spend their time raiding these while trying to build up their numbers.

Heading back to pick up some awesome armor sets from vanilla WoW or that dazzling weapon that'll have your enemies cowering in fear? Transmogrification makes it possible -- and World of Wardrobe shows you how.

Now that we've finished our whirlwind tour of Medivh's home and have two pieces of tier 4 in our pockets to show for it, it's time to head to the main highlight of The Burning Crusade expansion and dig up the rest of it. While Karazhan existed on Azeroth, the rest of tier 4 exists in Outland, scattered between two smaller raids -- the lairs of the pitlord Magtheridon and Gruul the Dragonkiller. Both raids were mercifully short when compared to the length of Karazhan, but both required some precision timing by raids to complete successfully.

Last week, we touched a little on attunement chains for The Burning Crusade. Long, arduous and a complete pain for those trying to get in on raiding late in the game, the attunement chains in Burning Crusade were systematically removed as the expansion went on. For those who jumped into raiding when The Burning Crusade was launched, however, both Gruul and Magtheridon were required kills to get to the next level of raiding content with the next tier of raiding gear.

Heading back to pick up some awesome armor sets from vanilla WoW or that dazzling weapon that'll have your enemies cowering in fear? Transmogrification makes it possible -- and World of Wardrobe shows you how.

Last week, we started the journey to pick up the first raiding tier of The Burning Crusade. Tier 4 was a bit of a revolution in the way that tier gear was obtained. Players no longer had to wait for their particular piece of gear to drop; instead, they looted tokens that were then turned in for the gear of their choice. We saw the beginnings of this back in tier 2.5, but the organizational element of it was sadly missing. By the time The Burning Crusade launched, players no longer had to obtain secondary items for their tier; the tokens were all that was required. But there were other differences that were unique to Burning Crusade raids -- mainly, the placement of tier loot.

If you wanted to raid in vanilla WoW, doing so required attuning yourself to the various raids available. In the case of Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Onyxia's Lair, this was done by completing a quest chain and obtaining an item or clicking an object that would allow you passage into the raid zone. When Ahn'Qiraj was launched, raiders had to complete an epic quest chain in order to open the gates to the raid, and non-raiders had to gather resources and supplies for the battle that would happen after. By the time the 40-man version of Naxxramas rolled around, all that was required was reputation, some gold, and a few items to get in.

This all changed with The Burning Crusade, and so did tier sets.