Posts with tag black-temple

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Are you sure you don't want green fire? Quite sure? Positively sure? Absolutely, one hundred percent sure?

Don't lie to me like that. You want it. You want to do the end of this questline, because it's so badass. I was spinning circles in my seat and giggling maniacally at how Kanrethad completely wiped the roof of the Black Temple with my body for two hours straight, because it was so much fun to be challenged not merely as a player, but as a whole warlock. You're going to use abilities you've almost never used before in this questline, and you're going to love all of it.

I hope I don't have to say it too much, but spoilers ahead.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

I'm stuck in downtown San Francisco until Friday. I apologize to everyone who lives in or around San Francisco, but this place kind of sucks.

darkpanda asked:

Did Cloud Serpent Racing never take off? (No pun intended). I've heard barely any mention of it since MoP launched. Whenever people talk about non Raiding activities, it's completely ignored. Did it get lost in the shuffle or was there never any longevity to it to begin with?

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?

Blizzard ruined my intro. I was going to talk about how appropriate it was that patch 5.1 included a scenario for warlocks that took them to the Black Temple. Then they pushed it to 5.2. So fine. I'll just fall back to something generic.

In terms of sheer content and changes, patch 2.1 was truly massive -- one of WoW's biggest patches of all time. It arrived in May 2007, five months into The Burning Crusade. Let's dive in!

Illidan shouts at us in person

We were ready, if not perhaps entirely prepared. After an ad campaign and a trailer that prominently featured Illidan, many players expressed disappointment that WoW's first expansion didn't launch with the Black Temple raid. In retrospect, those concerns seem silly today. If anything, the Black Temple released too early in the expansion, forcing Blizzard to add the ultradifficult Sunwell Plateau raid to fill the gap between expansions.

The Black Temple was an enormous raid, and one of the game's most beloved. No matter where you went, everything was big and scary. In some areas, even clearing the trash felt epic. Nine bosses populated a vast indoor/outdoor instance. Many of them are still remembered fondly. Supremus and Reliquary of Souls were highly memorable encounters, the latter partly due its unforgiving awareness checks. Teron Gorefiend and Illidan were major lore figures able to be vanquished in WoW for the first time.

BT wasn't the only raid that 2.1 introduced, however.

Blackwing Lair has long been my one of my favorite raids of all time. Not only did it have some fun, interesting, and even emotional boss fights back in its day, the weapon and tier gear graphics are still some of the best to this day. Unfortunately, going back in there for transmogrification gear has been a bit of a pain. This is because Razorgore, the first boss, must be done by at least two players: One to mind control him, one to kill the adds.

Patch 5.1 ends that. Not only can Razorgore be soloed (in theory), but a couple of other older dungeon bosses have been tweaked just a little.

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 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.

I know what you're thinking: What's the Raid Finder got to do with Warcraft lore, of all things? I hadn't really given it much thought, either. Generally speaking, Warcraft lore is a wholly separate animal from game mechanics. After all, the endless carrying of flags in Warsong Gulch doesn't exactly tell a compelling story, and returning to the same dungeon repeatedly to kill the same bosses over and over doesn't really make sense from a lore perspective, either.

When the Raid Finder was introduced, there were plenty of people curious about how it would turn out and far more who were excited about the possibilities of the feature. Along with cross-realm raiding, the Raid Finder has entirely changed the face of raiding as we know it. Much like the downsize from 40-man to 25-man with the release of The Burning Crusade expansion, the Raid Finder revolutionized raiding and changed it into something that far more easily accessible for players who don't necessarily have the time to dedicate to regular raiding.

This isn't to say that the Raid Finder is a magical solution to everything, however.

Klepsakovic over at Troll Racials are Overpowered has a thought-provoking post asking how Blizzard's advancing raid model is affecting players and how they relate to each other. In particular, he zeroes in on a point that I think a lot of players sense but never really articulate: Not every player in a raid is going to be equally stressed by a fight, and when the stressed party or parties is randomly determined, things get ugly fast.

Compare this to encounters where the primary difficulty is role-specific or even player-specific. Good DPSers pushed their output to the limit on Patchwerk, healers learned to anticipate damage during Malygos' Vortex while one or two people got good at yanking sparks into the raid, and tanks grew experienced with fast pick-ups on Kael'thas. But the average raid group, even when experienced, probably tripped over and over again on encounters like Teron Gorefiend or Anub'arak. When you can't control who gets targeted by Shadow of Death or Anub'arak's spikes and when the randomness limits the experience that any one player can get ... Well, it's easy to see how certain fights acquire the nightmare moniker.

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 we'll show you how!

While you're blazing your way through the Sunwell Plateau, don't forget about the other items you can nab along the way. In addition to the gear and items that drop in the raid, bosses drop Sunmotes, which can be traded along with various loot drops in Sunwell Plateau for other loot items. To trade these items, look for the NPC Yrma aboard the boat in Sunwell Harbor.

In addition, there is also plenty of unique-looking gear on Smith Hauthaa over in the armory section of the Isle. Unlike the other gear to be found on the Isle, everything that Hauthaa has can be purchased for justice points rather than fished out of an instance. If you've got a glut of justice points, it may be worth it to check out Hauthaa's wares and see if there's anything that catches your eye for transmogrification.

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 we'll show you how!

Sunwell Plateau was one of those raids that nobody ever expected to see -- nor did they expect additional items for their tier sets. However, the raid was well received. Raiders turned their focus to Sunwell Plateau and the loot within, including three new additions to their tier 6 sets in the form of belts, boots and bracers. However, despite carrying the same name as these tier sets, the models on these items didn't really match the sets at all. But fear not -- if you're looking for a snazzy matching outfit, the Sunwell has some unofficial sets that are absolutely gorgeous. These are the sets that the belts, boots and bracers were made for, and they're perfect for transmogrification. Check the gallery below for the sets, and follow us after the break for strats and guides to Sunwell Plateau.

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 we'll show you how!

Trying to head through the Black Temple for transmogrification gear? Be sure to check out the previous two weeks of articles for the start of Black Temple. Illidan's stronghold holds a score of villains to fight your way through, but this week we'll be discussing the last three.

A lot of raiders mistakenly thought that Black Temple was the last raid of The Burning Crusade, until they heard news of the Sunwell patch and yet more raiding content. For many players, however, Black Temple was a disappointment, not because it lacked in stunning visual scenery or interesting boss mechanics but because despite the changes to raid size, Black Temple was still not really widely obtainable. For many players, the closest look they'd get at Illidan Stormrage was The Burning Crusade trailer -- a pity, to say the very least.

Nowadays, those players at level 85 can go back and experience that content -- and I suggest you do! The Black Temple contains a lot of interesting lore and events, and the Illidan fight, while ridiculously easy, does see the return of a familiar face from Warcraft III.