Posts with tag cc

So, crowd control. Contrary to the name, it isn't really a good way of controlling crowds; rather, it's a great way to control the size of the crowd of mobs mercilessly attacking your tank. Crowd control in this post means abilities that can be applied prior to a pull. We'll get to abilites like Psychic Scream, warriors' Intimidating Shout and Shadowfury a bit later, but they're not our primary concern right now. There are some situations, particularly in the Rise of the Zandalari dungeons where pre-pull CC isn't possible (such as the adds on the way to Nalorakk in Zul'Aman) where you'll need to CC on the fly, but this is rarely the case.

Not all classes have crowd control abilities of the type we're talking about here. Warriors and death knights have a few stuns, fears and Hungering Cold, all of which can be put to excellent use but aren't really crowd control in this sense as they can't be cast prior to the pull.

So which classes have these pre-pull crowd control abilities, and what are they?

Frostheim appears to be decimated, unable to write this week, over the loss of the most recent raiding gun from the patch 4.3 PTR files. As someone who PVPs to get my first raiding weapon of most patches, I can choose whichever ranged death-dealing machine I want. Of course, as a Worgen (not to mention someone who is generally the butt of many of Frostheim's jokes on our podcast), I usually choose a crossbow after buying, returning and screenshotting the gun.

Today, Scattered Shots will be all about a very basic hunter PVP survival skill: scatter-trapping. All hunters of all specs can scatter-trap, and whether you're being ganked doing dailies, trying to win Baradin Hold, or doing competitive Arena, it's one of those skills that can really set you apart.

Traps on their own are only useful for people you can force to cross through them. Mostly, this means melee, although you can sometimes force a ranged player to cross a trap if you're humping a pillar properly. What do we do when we want to freeze someone who isn't chasing us, though? Freezing Trap is really our most effective crowd control ability. We'll often want it to be used on someone that matters like a healer. Unfortunately, short of stepping up to a healer and dropping a trap on them, there's no way to force them to cross our path.

Please note I said "tanking" and not "tanks." If you know a tank, give him or her a hug. He or she isn't clad in cold metal or an angry bear that will tear off your face because of you; it's those pesky mobs.

The tanking system has long been somewhat problematic in World of Warcraft. While it scales to some degree, from 5-man dungeons to 10-man raids, the scaling falls apart when we get to 25-man raiding, which currently demands about the same amount of tanking as 10-man. You can get through most of Firelands with two tanks, no matter your raid size. Majordomo Staghelm only requires one tank, again, no matter your raid size. This means that the scaling from five to 10 works, but as soon as you go from 10 to 25, instead of needing 2.5 times more tanks, you need no more tanks.

The other problem is simply that there already aren't enough tanks for every 5-man group. When the Call to Arms feature was announced for the Dungeon Finder tool, it was created out of the simple fact that we're not seeing the distribution we'd expect in the playerbase. In order for the Dungeon Finder to work without significant group queues, we would need 20% of the people queuing up to be tanks (1 in 5 = 20%). This is not the case.

People simply don't want the perceived group responsibility of tanking. It's why changes were made to CC mechanics that allow groups to CC on the fly without pulling. It's why Call to Arms exists. And yet, despite both of these changes, tanking was still so unattractive to players that threat itself needed to be redesigned. All of this work to try and get people to tank. Maybe the problem isn't the players here, though. Maybe it's the role.

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 walked into today's edition of The Queue fully intending to be a counterpoint to Adam's Queue yesterday -- I would walk in, say mages are awesome, and mages everywhere would herald me as their redemption. I would be carried off into the sunset as a hero. The problem is ... I can't do it. I just can't lie like that. Mages are awful! Warlocks are also awful, though. I would say that shadow priests are obviously the best casters, but then I would be stroking Fox's ego, and you people do that enough already.

Warriors need a caster spec, obviously.

Faltor asked:

As a new tank learning in the Cataclysm era, what is the most common standard for marking? I know almost everybody uses skull for first kill and sheep for moon, but everything else seems fair game. I know the right answer is just "explain what you use to the DPS" but I want to use something close to standard if there is one (like, does X really usually mean kill second).

Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. This week, take back control of your life with LoseControl.

Give me an A! Give me a -ddon! Give me a Spotlight! What's that spell? A half-assed attempt at an engaging introduction for this week's Addon Spotlight! Does that lame joke make you want to charge my office and do physical harm to me? Well, good, because this week's addon is a PvP-centric tool that can help you regain control of your character and potentially your sanity.

One of the worst feelings is losing control of your character. In fact, as a design decision, many MMOs including WoW limit the amount of player abilities that cause a player to lose control of their avatar. No one likes losing total control for a long time -- it just isn't fun! Balance reasons aside, there is a reason that most stuns, CC options, and other abilities are on short timers.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Join World of Warcraft's first hero class as we head into a new expansion and shed the new kid on the block label.

Now, before you get too excited about the title, we still don't know when patch 4.1 is dropping, much less when it's coming to the PTR, so don't think this is any sort of announcement. That said, it's never too early to wish and speculate. I won't deny it, I love death knights and I love balanced classes, but not everything I want for death knights is ironclad. A lot of what I want would probably turn them into horribly overpowered machines of death and destruction, powered by the tears of lesser classes. That said, as I've played my death knight day by day, there are a few things I've noticed time and time again, quality of life issues that could really use some TLC from the dev team -- things that I am relatively sure wouldn't overpower us if fixed up.

This week, I'm going to discuss three death knight issues I've noticed in Cataclysm and how I think Blizzard should fix them with the next major content or class balance patch.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we continue our discussion of ways to avoid dying horribly. This week's tip: Roll a death knight.

Yes, the sad reality of being a mage is the ever-present threat of a swift and ignominious demise. We're like every character in The Walking Dead: We could go at any time, and our only consolation is that God willing, we'll be able to blow up a few zombies on our way out.

Last week, we discussed a few methods for surviving to pew pew another day, namely aggro drop and damage mitigation. This week, we turn our attention to two other lifesaving techniques: movement and crowd control. Just remember as we go forward that every time a mage survives a fight, an angel punches a warlock in the face. Have I used that joke before? I may have. Doesn't make it any less true. Angels hate warlocks. So does Jesus. And me. And, I pray, all of you.

New around here? WoW Rookie has your back! Get all our collected tips, tricks and tactics for new players in the WoW Rookie Guide. WoW Rookie is about more than just being new to the game; it's about checking new areas, new styles, and new zones.

Ladies and gentlemen who run dungeons in 2011, if I could offer you only one tip for the successful instances, crowd control would be it. The healing and tanking benefits of crowd control have been proven by thousands of PUGs and guild groups, while the rest of the internet's sea of elite advice is the theoretical ravings of armchair quarterbacks. They will dispense that advice daily. Some is true, some is probable, but not all of it is absolute. But trust me on the crowd control. There is very little you can do to improve your dungeon experience than execute crowd control and not stand in fire. Today, we will focus on crowd control.

In the days of yore, crowd control mostly meant Sap and sheep (which is to say, Polymorph). But as content patches and expansions grew over the years, the concept of crowd control has grown as well. Now, you have slows, snares, traps, debuffs, fears, and every combination you can imagine. Every class has some form of crowd control.

Essentially, the job of crowd control is to slow down or keep a mob from doing the damage it wishes to your group.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. The shadow-specced Fox Van Allen returns every Wednesday to denounce the evils of truth and love (and healing) in an overwrought effort to extend his reach to the stars above. And yes, that makes our healing priest columnist Dawn Moore Jessie.

Cast Mind Blast on targets afflicted with Vampiric Touch. Keep Shadow Word: Pain refreshed by casts of Mind Flay. Cast Shadow Word: Death as a finishing move. Rinse and repeat.

I love shadow priesting, but it can get a little repetitive at times. It doesn't have to be, though -- shadow priests hands down have access to more abilities than any other class in the game.

How is that possible? Through Mind Control. It opens up an entire world of new abilities to shadow priests. By controlling our enemies, we can control what they do. Sure, you've cast Devouring Plague. But have you ever cast Disease Breath? You've boosted your tank's maximum health through Power Word: Fortitude, but have you ever done it through Renegade Strength? Like some kind of shadowy blue mage, we have access to hundreds of our enemies' abilities through Mind Control.

Mind Control is the most misunderstood crowd control ability in the game. It's also the most powerful, hands down. Shadow priests and tanks, take notice -- if you're not utilizing Mind Control, the way you run Cataclysm heroics is about to change forever.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, a public service announcement:

An open letter to the guy who keeps breaking my sheep:

Please stop.

Sincerely,

Christian

P.S. -- Listen. I know it's Christmas and I should probably be doing a puff piece on things I want for my mage for Christmas or something like that. But I Simply can't stay quiet. We wiped 20 times in that heroic Grim Batol run last night, and though I know not everybody who plays this game reads this column, I have to do what I can. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, or something like that.

I know The Burning Crusade happened like two years ago. I'm well aware that there's a distinct possibility you started playing the game during Wrath. Perhaps you either don't remember or don't have any idea what a "Polymorph" is or why it's not in your best interests to immediately begin whacking whatever I just cast it on as hard as you possibly can. I'm willing to allow for ignorance.

Mages, I can even understand it when you don't sheep things. Polymorph doesn't do any damage; in fact it heals its target! Why would you want to use a spell that doesn't blow things up when there are so many other delightful spells in your spellbook that do? It seems counter to everything we got into magecraft for.

Wrath was a long expansion. For the better part of two years, we spent the majority of our time chain pulling and AoE-farming our way through every instance in sight, concentrating on one thing and one thing only: DPS. Recount gave us a number at the end of every boss fight, and if that number was higher than the warlock's number, we had done a good job. Sure, the fights sometimes had mechanics we needed to pay attention to, but they mostly involved moving from one place to stand and shoot to another place to stand and shoot. We forgot a very important part of our jobs as mages.

We forgot how to sheep.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, Arcane Brilliance is feeling especially festive. Pyroblasting a turkey will do that.

So apparently it's the holiday season. I'm still burping up cranberries and stuffing, my wife has started forcing Christmas music upon me (and frankly, if it's not Mannheim Steamroller, I don't want to hear it), and I've reached the point in the year when -- for my own mental well-being -- I refuse to look at a bank statement until February. To those of you who survived yesterday's annual gladiatorial bloodletting and emerged victorious from the front doors of Walmart or Old Navy, hoisting your hard-won set of hand towels above your head like a trophy: I salute you. To those of you who, like me, stayed home and bought stuff on Steam and Xbox Live: I also salute you, only I do so from my chair, by typing in an emote. Because, really, we're all pretty lazy. But damned if I don't feel well rested.

In deference to the spirit of the season, we here at Arcane Brilliance thought it might be nice to spend a column thinking about the things we're grateful right now. You'll find the mage-related stuff behind the jump, but here's my non-mage-related short list of awesome things:

1. flatbread chicken sandwiches
2. getting randomly tagged on Dragon Quest IX while walking through the airport Tuesday night
3. troll druid cat form
4. The Walking Dead
5. Mumford and Sons
6. discovering the brilliance of Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights on Netflix

Taco Bell, Netflix, Square Enix, etc. ... feel free to make any and all endorsement checks out to Christian Belt, care of WoW Insider. Also, screw you, AMC, for canceling Rubicon. I was just starting to enjoy that one. And screw you double, FOX, for putting Fringe on Fridays, where all good FOX shows go to die.

It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, weekly mage column of choice for dress-wearing, warlock-hating Frostbolt slingers the world over. Also, fans of the short musical films of Journey, Short Imagined Monologues, and the sublime, video game-based synth and fretwork amalgams of Sixto Sounds. Seriously, listen to this one. Holy crap.

So over the past few days, I've found myself a broken corpse lying in a spreading puddle of my own bodily fluids a bit more frequently than I'm used to. The reason for this is simple: heroics. No, not the ones on the live servers -- where you can throw together a random group consisting of a ret pally tank, a six-year-old playing a hunter his mom bought him on eBay the day before, a feral druid healer who for some reason came into the instance suffering from nine more minutes of resurrection sickness, a mouth-breathing rogue who may or may not be a serial killer, and an AFK shaman farming badges while auto-following the healer -- and still blast through the place. I'm talking about heroics in the Cataclysm beta.

They're absolutely brutal, guys. Now, granted -- it's still early. The testing process for these beauties is still in its infancy. We're tackling them using premade characters with talent builds we threw together by looking at the talents and thinking, "This looks nice." We're wearing gear that's barely entry-level for heroics (if we're lucky) and using spell rotations that we're basically making up on the fly. We're going into instances we've never seen before, doing boss fights nobody knows the mechanics for, and dealing with crippling, often game-breaking bugs. These places simply aren't finished, not by a long shot.

But then again, that's why we have a beta. We go in, throw our soft, cloth-clad bodies against the long claws of some horrifying beast or another, use the final droplets of our blood to scrawl feedback for the developers ("Landmines ... everywhere ... can't feel ... legs ... fading to black ... tell warlocks ... hate them ... so ... much ... "), and then come back for another round. Blizzard takes the data it gathers from our gruesome deaths and uses it to construct a better game.

Still, there is much we can learn -- even in this unfinished state -- from the first incarnations of these heroics. Join me after the jump, won't you?

I was just bemoaning that we haven't gotten a chance to see patch 3.2's new raid content yet. It looks like that chance will come sooner than I expected: tomorrow night!

Daelo has just posted a testing schedule for Trial of the Crusader (a.k.a. Crusader's Coliseum).

• North American realms: Lord Jaraxxus, Thursday, July 9, starting at 7 PM EDT
• European realms: Eydis Darkbane and Fjola Lightbane, Thursday, July 9, starting at 19:00 CEST

Both of these fights will be available in normal mode (10 or 25) only, not heroic. The new 5-man, Trial of the Champion, will be open "later in the PTR cycle."

He also notes that Koralon, the new Vault boss, will be up, and you'll be able to access it if your side has Wintergrasp. Tanking and DPS Patchwerks will make a return. Unlike the patch 3.1 PTR tanking Patchwerk, this one just hits really hard ("as hard as Algalon"), all the time (instead of ramping his damage up over time).

Oh, and one more thing: there is, apparently, no trash at all in this raid. Woot?

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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10-man	ilvl	25-man
Naxx	200
KT, EoE	213	Naxx
Ulduar	219
Ulduar hard	226	Ulduar, KT/EoE
CC	232	Ulduar weapons
	239	Ulduar hard
CC hard	245	CC
	258	CC hard

Well, that answers that question. According to what MMO-Champion has found in the PTR item database, Tier 9 gear from patch 3.2's Crusader's Coliseum raid comes in three different versions for each set (T7 and T8 come in two, from 10- and 25-man). There's one version at ilvl 232, one at 245, and one at 258. This leads to the following loot distribution, I'd guess:

• 10-man normal (232) < 10-man hard (245) = 25-man normal (245) < 25-man hard (258)

Others (such as 10n < 25n < 10h = 25h) are logically possible, but to me, that's the most likely distribution that leads to three different ilvls. It's also the way Ulduar is done with normal and hard modes, apart from some differences in weapon ilvl.

Crusader's Coliseum on heroic is a bit different than Ulduar hard modes, though. It seems that when you do a heroic CC raid, you start out with a certain number of attempts (wipes), and the more attempts you have remaining upon defeating the final boss, the better loot you get. So will ilvl 258 gear be contingent upon beating CC-heroic in (say) fewer than half your attempts? I guess we'll have to wait and find out.

Of course, the really important question is: what the heck will we call the 3 different sets? T9.0, T9.33, T9.66?

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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The first patch 3.2 PTR client is now available for download, which means it's available for datamining. The ever-resourceful people at wirebrain have done just this to all the achievements found in the client, and have unearthed some interesting new details. We are unable to verify this information right now, but here's what they've found.

Read on after the cut for:

• A new holiday.
• The names of the bosses in the new raid and 5-man dungeon, and their related achievements.
• A new Vault of Archavon boss.

To be clear, there will be spoilers.