Posts with tag bosses

So one of the new changes coming in Patch 3.3.3 is that one will be able queue up using the dungeon finder in order to fight world event bosses such as the Crown Chemical Trio or the Headless Horseman. However, the actual extent of the changes is a bit more involved, as Zarhym clarified in a recent forums post. Here's the rundown:

Today's announcement of the upcoming Ruby Sanctum raid, coming with Patch 3.3.5, was well-met, though it raised a number of questions as to the nature of the instance -- how will it work, what kind of loot can we expect, etc. Zarhym popped back into the original thread a few times to give clarification on a few points:

• While the instance has a similar layout to the Obsidian Sanctum philosophically, the three sub-bosses (Saviana Ragefire, Baltharus the Warborn, and General Zarithrian) will each be own encounter all their own. The "drakes-up" functionality of Sartharion will not carry over into the Halion encounter.
• Heroic difficulty is likely to be toggled in the same way that heroic difficulties are handled in ICC (a UI toggle).
• Saviana, Baltharus, and Zarithrian will each drop an Emblem of Frost, but probably not special loot.
• Expect loot in the instance to be "about the same item level" as the Lich King items on their respective difficulties.
• The loot from Halion will be offset pieces as well as trinkets and other items "of that nature." So, basically, Sartharion loot.
• The instance is intended to be a prelude to Cataclysm and should provide some advancement for the new expansion's storyline before the 4.0 patch, drawing on Deathwing's desire to weaken the Wyrmrest Accord prior to his emergence from Deepholm.
• Arthas is still considered the final boss of the expansion -- this is merely a complementary raid, like Onyxia with ToC, with ties to Cataclysm.

Sounds like about what we were expecting. Keep an eye on WoW.com for more information on the Ruby Sanctum as it comes in, likely starting with the upcoming PTR.

Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com's series of fantasy death matches.

Ladies and gentlemen, gnomes and ghouls ... We have our season champion: Ley-Guardian Eregos of The Oculus! In the hotly contested finals of the Wrath Original Five-Man season, Eregos tipped the scales to triumph over Anub'Arak, 48% to 42.6%. Such was the confusion that spectators hardly knew which way to look, with nearly 10% of them throwing up their hands to declare the death match a tie.

In fact, the Ley-Guardian's time inside the Two Bosses Thunderdome was anything but routine.

Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com's series of fantasy death matches. We're moving from the quarter-finals into the semi-finals of the Original Five-Man Wrath of the Lich King season. Grab a seat, and let's get ready to rumble!

Anub'Arak scuttled King Ymiron and his longboats last week, 60.8% to 35.9%, to advance to this week's season finale of the Original Wrath Five-Man season of Two Bosses Enter. In the highly anticipated finals, Anub'Arak will burrow into the Thunderdome to face the dreaded Ley-Guardian Eregos. If you've never participated in a Two Boss Enters match before, please be sure to read the Thunderdome ground rules before casting your vote. Visit the comments first to get as broad a view of the match as possible before deciding whose pennant you'll be waving in the stands.

But first: We're taking a new angle inside the Thunderdome for upcoming seasons of Two Bosses Enter, One Boss Leaves. Each match will be decided by a distinguished panel of judges -- and you're invited to sit on the panel! Details after the break.

Update: We've added an overhead video to help you understand how the immunities work. Now, back to your regularly scheduled strategy guide.

Want to do the Love is in the Air holiday bosses? Short version: don't stand in things.

Longer version, you say? Sure, we can do that. First off, while there is a quest chain that leads you to Shadowfang Keep, you do not have to have done any of those quests to engage the evil Crown Chemical Company apothecaries: there's a helpful NPC, Investigator Fezzen Brasstacks who will give you the quest and items necessary for the fight. Like previous holiday bosses, you'll be able to engage the apothecaries once per player so yes, you can chain in alts and keep repeating the fight over and over again. (I believe we killed them roughly eight times before people started getting sleepy.)

Love is already in the air on the European realms and MMO Champion has the details on the loot which drops from the three new Love is in the Air bosses. Three apothecaries have taken up shop in Shadowfang Keep: Baxter, Hummel and Frye. They'll be there for the duration of the holiday as daily quest bosses and following is a list of what they drop (mouseover for their stats):

• Winking Eye of Love
• Heartbreak Charm
• Shard of Pirouetting Happiness
• Sweet Perfume Broach
• Choker of the Pure Heart
• Forever-Lovely Rose
• Vile Fumigator's Mask
• Toxic Wasteling
• The Heartbreaker

But the drop from Apothecary Hummel that I am most excited about is the Big Love Rocket Mount. It's pink, it has zhevra seats and a naughty, naughty name. Naughty.

Stay tuned for more Love is in the Air info as it comes in.

Name: Mystifying Charm (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)
Type: Epic Offhand
Damage/Speed: N/A
Attributes:

• +65 Stamina, +65 Intellect, +57 Spirit
• Improves crit strike rating by 57 and spell power by 100.

Now this is interesting. Our old friend Jesta, who made the EpicAdvice.com site not so long ago, is working on a new project at EpicPlan.com, and while it's still hidden away in pre-alpha, you can see what they're up to in this thread on EA. It's a slideshow/diagramming web app, basically -- you can take maps of the game's instances, lay out icons and symbols on them as you wish, and then animate and caption boss fights and encounters. The end result is a very clear way to show off different raid strategies, and we're told the slideshows are embeddable on other sites as well (you may even see some here eventually on WoW.com).

Unfortunately, they're only taking signups for the beta of the service right now, and while you can watch a show in action on the technology demo, you can't make your own quite yet. But it seems like a very impressive tool for raidleaders, both to share plans with the public and players seeking help, as well as your own raid members. It'll be great to be able to make a quick and easy visual display of where to stand and what to do during boss fights and instance encounters.

I like Nibuca's little writeup recently from her blog asking what happens when we become just too powerful to care? Just like her, I've played a full, months-and-months, session of D&D before, and by the time your characters start to flirt with level 20 (the maximum level in that system), you're so powerful that the story barely makes sense any more -- you're crossing planes of existence, unweaving and re-weaving the fabric of reality, and taking down gods, more or less. Once you've vanquished evil from the earth four or five times, yet another threat doesn't bother you so much.

And to a certain extent, that's exactly what's happening with World of Warcraft -- when the game first started, the devs casually threw out there that it would take 40 level 80s to take Arthas down, which was of course a guess based on what raiding was at the time. But nowadays, we're all level 80, you only need five people to go after Arthas, and very soon, even someone like Deathwing will seem conquerable. In the next expansion, we already know that we're going to transverse some planes of existence, and when you're a being that can do that, why bother fighting frost wyrms? Just escape their reality and/or will them out of yours.

I had an idea like this one -- a site that would allow you to rate anything at all (from a new movie to the casserole your aunt makes), and then let other people share their own opinions about whatever you rated. My idea never got off the ground (standard operating procedure for the idea mill I call my mind), but reader Antoine apparently had the same idea, and built it specifically for the WoW universe. WoW Ratings is kind of a silly site with some interesting outcomes: basically it's a database of everything in the game, from bosses to zones to game features or what have you, and you can come along and rate whatever you want on a scale of 1 to 5. The ratings don't actually mean anything (though Antoine has them listed as qualities from Uncommon up to Legendary), so it's really just a broad temperature-taking of the World (of Warcraft) at large.

The most interesting screen is probably the "Best and Worst" screen (which you can reach by clicking on the toolbar at the top of the homepage -- note to Antoine: permalinks are your friend, scale back on the javascript), where, as of this writing, Hakkar the Soulflayer is sitting on top of the heap, and the Voice Chat patch and Darnassus are sitting in the bottom 10. No Fandral Staghelm yet, strangely, but I'm sure things will get shaken up after all you readers head over there (and if the site's a little shaky under the flood of our link, give it time to get back on its feet). Sure, it's a little silly, and it's not so much a "resource" as it is just a free-for-all of player opinions, but it is interesting to see kind of a meta-overview of what players do and don't like. Useless features for the loss, old school raid bosses for the win.

Blizzard has posted the schedule this week for testing of the new bosses in Icecrown Citadel on the patch 3.3 PTR. Here's what Slorkuz on the EU forums says is going down:

US PTRs
October 21 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT - Festergut
October 22 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT - Icecrown Gunship Battle

EU PTRs
October 21 at 19:30 CEST - Rotface (this test is already over, unfortunately)
October 22 at 19:30 CEST - Icecrown Gunship Battle

As always, these schedules and everything else on the PTR is subject to change at a moment's notice. You can find short descriptions of what we know about the bosses after the break.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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Of course the issue is supposed to be fixed now, but after getting booted off their mains in Ulduar, Dark Haven on Baelgun had had enough, and made a dancing line of cows to display their displeasure. Pretty funny.

Lots more guild shenigans in this week's Guildwatch as usual, including some drama (both good and bad), some downed news, and some recruiting posts. Tune in after the break below to see what's going on around the servers. And if you have a tip, from your guild or something you saw on the forums, send it along to us at guildwatch@wow.com. Thanks!

GuildOx sends an email to tell us that they've set up 10-man strict ratings on their guild progression website. They've always offered 10-man ratings, though a lot of guilds run both 10- and 25-man content, and it's not quite legit to stack the "10-man only" guilds up against the guilds who occasionally do 25-man content (and thus have chances at better gear, no matter how much of a difference it makes). Hence, enter the "10-man strict" ratings -- these are guilds who have not run any 25-man content, according to a set of criteria that GuildOx has put together?

What is that criteria? You won't be allowed to earn any Coliseum normal kills or Ulduar 25 hard-mode kills. You are still allowed to PuG those fights, though the limit is 10 players over time, or five in the same fight (in other words, if 10 players of your guild accomplish a kill in 25-man Coliseum, or five of them do it in the same raid, you're off the 10-man strict list). That's designed to make sure that the list stays as clean as possible. You'll have to watch recruits, too -- anyone who enters your guild with a certain achievement has it counted towards that total of 10 players as well. All the other info you need to know about the listings are over in their FAQ.

Players may find other ways around the limit (there is, of course, higher level gear now available from Emblems that 10-player guilds are still able to get), but for now, that's where GuildOx is putting the limit, so if you want to stay on the list, follow their rules. Good luck to all of the strictly 10-man guilds out there.