Posts with tag SerpentshrineCavern

So first there were quests to get into Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. Then Blizzard created "attunement scrolls," which dropped from the bosses of each and allowed guilds to attune other players or alts who'd missed out on the action so far. And then Blizz removed the attunements entirely. So what happened to the quests and the scrolls?

All we know about the quests so far is that Blizzard has promised to add extra steps onto them to reward the people who actually did them (we don't know what the rewards will be quite yet). But Boubouille at MMO Champion has a good line on what's up with the scrolls-- they still drop, but now instead of granting attunements, they grant flasks, usable in all the higher level raid instances.

The good news, as we heard at BlizzCon, is that Blizzard says they've learned their lesson from this fiasco, and attunements in upcoming patches and expansions will be a little less intensive (which is fine by me-- I'd rather difficulty keep people away from a dungeon rather than a super-long attunement questline). But if you've got any of these scrolls still around, feel free to use them for flasks. As a commenter says, it's a buy and use 25 flasks, get 5 free sale!

Prise on Lightning's Blade (EU) sends in this amazing shot from the interior of Serpentshrine Cavern, right where Hydross the Unstable would be, if he were still alive when this screenshot were taken. Prise explains that the blue rays do figure-eights around the two columns -- and I'm thinking a still screenshot doesn't do the place justice.

Do you have a unique shot of Azeroth or Outland that you'd like to show off to the rest of the world? Tell us about it by e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com! Or perhaps you'd just like to see more of your pics from Around Azeroth.

Hello all, and welcome to Gamers on the Street! In this column I will be logging into a different server each week to create a character and ask completetly random gamers of both factions their opinions about things that are currently impacting players in World of Warcraft. In this way we hope to reach out to the community and give some everyday gamers a chance to talk about some of the things going on in game.

This week, I picked the Gnomeregan server by asking someone in the <It came from the Blog> guild to name a server for me. It was the first one that was given to me. I rolled my two characters -- a Gnome Rogue and a Troll Rogue, which I dutifully leveled past one so nobody thought I was a gold spammer -- and headed for the major cities nearby to ask my questions. Amusingly, getting anyone to talk to you at level five (Alliance) or three (Horde) was difficult to say the least...

Players have pretty much /cheered across the board about the removal of attunements from Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep yesterday-- even the Blizzard curmudgeons over at PaladinSucks nodded in approval.

But as Elizabeth asks on the WoW Livejournal, what exactly does this mean? Can your guild change this weekend's Gruul run into a raid on The Eye? Can guilds skip over Karazhan and Heroics now, and just head straight to Serpentshrine? Will we see Void Reaver dropped by most guilds quicker than Isiah Washington from Gray's Anatomy?

Unfortunately, the answer to those questions is probably no. True, the removal of attunements does mean that more guilds can head into SSC and Tempest Keep right away (instead of waiting for 25 of their members to get attuned), but the bosses in both of the big raids aren't real forgiving unless your guild has already seen a few Kara clears, a few successful Gruul raids, and hopefully even a Magtheridon raid or two as well. Just as a reference, Void Reaver, the first boss in The Eye, requires about three or four tanks in the raid, and easily hits for 7k in the space of a few seconds. Likewise, Hydross, the first boss in Serpentshrine, is not nice to raids-- his adds hit for about 5-6k, and he enrages within 10 minutes.

But on the other hand, if you have run Kara, Gruul, and Mag a few times, most guilds are saying you'll have no problem at all with Void Reaver, so guilds who are ready already will definitely benefit from the attunements opening up for all. But if you're still stuck on Curator or Shade of Aran, you likely won't get much out of SSC or TK except a repair bill and a bit of perspective. You'll need to gear up before tackling the bigger stuff.

There might be no guild in all of Azeroth that has attracted attention like Nihilum has. They've charged through the endgame, gaining an unimaginable four world firsts in one day. They've downed Illidan. They've beaten the game.

And even out of the game, they seem to be a lightning rod for controversy. They don't like girls. They supposedly cheated on Vashj, and maybe they buy gold. Players have followed Nihilum's exploits like no other guild-- some hate them and some look up to them, but everyone who follows news from the endgame must know who they are.

Now, in their first exclusive interview after downing Archimonde and finishing off the current content, Awake from Nihilum spoke with us to talk about all of these things and more. What did they and did they not like about the endgame they just beat? What's Nihilum going to do now? And exactly how many of them have girlfriends?

Click the link below to read this exclusive interview, and get a glimpse of what it's like to run with the guild that beat the game. Questions were collected from both WoW Insider staff, and from members of our own casual guild, It came from the Blog. Thanks to Awake from Nihilum for doing this with us, and good luck to him and his guild in future content.

Tobold, MMO blogger-at-large, has posted that he has cancelled his World of Warcraft account.

Sign of the times or outraged for the wrong reason? That's for you to decide-- Tobold says his guild has moved on to Serpentshrine, and since he's not attuned yet, he probably never will be, which means there's no point to moving on. Apparently no one has told him about Vashj's attunement scrolls, which will let a guild that beats Vashj attune whoever they want to SSC. Of course, he'd have to wait until his guild actually beats Vashj, but hope is not lost yet.

Then again, maybe Tobold's just going with the flow. If you ask me, leaving because your guild has moved on is a terrible reason to leave-- not only is there lots to do out there, either on your own or with the people in your guild who don't happen to be running SSC, but I do believe there is more than one guild in the game. Surely someone else would be willing to take Tobold to Karazhan, right?

Either way, it's his choice. As he says, cancelling the account sends a clear message to Blizzard that he wants things to change. And if enough people send that message (for whatever reason), then you can't but agree that they will.

Our good friend Boubouille over at MMO Champion has unearthed yet another fun piece of loot over on the PTR, but this one's more useful out of battle than it is in battle: it's a Serpentshrine Cavern attunement scroll, that apparently drops from Lady Vashj.

This thing will be a godsend to casual gamers, or even hardcore folks with alts who never get played for attunement. Basically (I think it's a one-per-kill drop, though maybe it's less than that), Vashj after 2.1 will drop a scroll (with one use, I believe) that can attune anyone level 70 to Serpentshrine Cavern. So all your guild has to really do now is attune 25 people and down Vashj, and then she'll drop scrolls which will let other folks in. All of the raiding fun, without any of the attunement quest (which ran from Heroic Slave Pens through Gruul and Karazhan).

In other Vashj attunement news, Boubouille is also reporting that unlimited Vials of Eternity are dropping-- one for every person in the raid. That's needed for the Mount Hyjal attunement quest, and before, only a few dropped at a time. So a couple of good changes for casual raiders-- looks like the road to Mount Hyjal is a little less steep than it used to be.

There's been a low-level murmur for weeks in the Raids and Dungeons forum about the amount of trash in Serpentshrine Cavern. Words like "nightmare", "soul-destroying", and "worse than Twin Emps-C'thun trash" were bandied about. The problem wasn't just the amount of trash, but the respawn time -- with 45-minute respawns, guilds were literally watching trash respawn behind them as they cleared. And as more guilds check into early Tempest Keep, they're finding the same situation.

This week, the wave finally crested, with members of Death and Taxes, Curse, and other top guilds arguing that the trash situation has become unbearable. Selected comments from the threads follow:

• Guass of Ret, Mal'Ganis: "I personally enjoy when trash respawns in the middle of a boss fight because it isn't linked to anything. It's things like this which make me feel like I wasn't meant to be raiding this zone yet ... nor was anyone else."
• Marolla of Crimson, Greymane: "Since typically one dungeon is being started while another is released, I can only assume that the crew that did MC, AQ40 and SSC is a bunch of sadists and needs to be burned at the stake. Please let the crew that did BWL and Naxx be in charge of all hiring decisions from this point forward."
• Mek, raid leader of Curse, Vek'linash-EU: "Trash should be killed once in a night of tries on a boss. Fine, it respawns on a soft reset or a 6 hour timer, but not this garbage we have now. If you do not fix this you are eventually going to kill off high-end raiding because we just do not want to do this anymore."
• Cherrie of Death and Taxes, Korgath: "I personally love hours upon hours of trash. I especially enjoy having to kill it multiple times because the respawn is so quick. I enjoy it ALMOST as much as fighting untuned bosses. THE SARCASM, IT'S OVERWHELMING!"
• Plastique of Death and Taxes, Korgath: "As much as I know you need us to play-test all of these new instances, we might not volunteer for it anymore since it's threatening our sanity ... please don't release Black Temple. It's too soon." (Italics added for emphasis.)
• And finally, Clockwork of the reformed Overrated, Korgath, wins the thread and the entire internet with: "Wow, what a bunch of whiners. Stop crying and just clear the trash, OK?"

I haven't seen much of 25-man raiding in TBC beyond what a rogue, a mage, and a quick portal to Shattrath can show you, but the trash situation sounds like it's really wearing on the top guilds. When a member of Death and Taxes asks Blizzard NOT to release new content, something is not right. It also looks like there's near-universal hatred of the trash clears, inasmuch as every guild that's posted in these threads has decried them.

Have you seen the trash in SSC and Tempest Keep? Does it sound excessive to you, or is multiple trash clears the price you pay for being on the cutting edge?

According to Tigole, a hotfix to the Lady Vashj encounter (the final encounter in Serpentshrine Cavern) should go live on US realms in the next 24 hours -- presumably during this Tuesday's maintenance, though Tigole doesn't specify. Specifically, the hotfix should adjust the amount of hitpoints some of the add spawns have.

With only three guilds up to Lady Vash so far, this hotfix sets up some real competition. MMO-CHAMPION makes the reasonable speculation that if the hotfix requires downtime US guild Death & Taxes will likely get the world first kill, because US maintenance comes before EU maintenance. But if it's a hotfix requiring no downtime (that may have even gone live already), EU guilds Curse and Nihilum will have extra time to work on the encounter before their instance resets, giving one of them the world first. So who's going to win this race? If I don't see a first kill announcement somewhere in the next 24 hours, I'll be greatly surprised.