Posts with tag fun

My Horde guild recently discovered something interesting about the Dark Shaman encounter, as you can see detailed in the video above. This interesting something is the fact that the Dark Shaman will, in fact, teleport to wherever you pull them from--including the roof of the Orgrimmar auction house. This could be a little challenging in a fight where positioning is actually quite important. Oops!

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Every other week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Stacey Landry is the resident mage here, bender of space and time, conjurer of delicious confectioneries and expert at dressing well while setting things on fire.

I know that some of you who read this column may not be full-time mages. Some of you may have mage alts. Some of you are warlocks - actually an alarming number of you are warlocks, I think that you secretly like us. That's okay, you could always make a mage and be eight billion times more awesome. We'll wait.

That's not what I'm here to talk about today, though. I know that sometimes as a DPS player it can become easy to get caught up in numbers. Best in slot gear, logs, damage done - all of that. I'm not saying that doing damage isn't fun. It is ridiculous, enemy annihilating fun. But there's more to life as a mage than that. In the spirit of the holidays, I'd like to discuss some of those more lighthearted things. They should apply to long time mages and dabblers alike, unless otherwise noted.

It's true that nearly every day we feature a machinima on WoW Moviewatch, but we here at WoW Insider occasionally feel compelled to pick favorites, or at least memorable ones. Today, I want to focus on some older gems that haven't had any time in the spotlight for a while and deserve some love. If you're new to the game these videos might provide you a glimpse into an inaccessible time now gone, and if you're new to machinima it might spark a desire to seek out more. Regardless, I've chosen a variety of films that hopefully showcase the enormous potential in using WoW's game engine to produce cinematic content, as well as the boundless creativity and talent within the WoW community. Read and watch on below the cut.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

If your guild has been struggling during the last weeks of 2012, now is the time to take steps that ensure a better 2013. Here are three ways you could get the New Year started off right.

1. Add fresh blood to the officer ranks.

Are your current officers pushing themselves too hard? Or are they doing barely anything at all? If so, then it's high time you took a look at what needs to be done around the guild and who's actually doing it. You may have some lame-duck officers who shouldn't be officers anymore, and some hard-working regular members who deserve a promotion.

Adding new officers -- and/or culling useless ones -- can energize your leadership corps. Having more hands to man the ship can spread the work around and ease burnout symptoms. New officers also means new ideas that can spark new guild activities or better approaches to old ones. New officers can also inject some much-needed enthusiasm as they seek to make their mark and prove to the vets that they are worthy of the rank. If your guild has been stagnating lately, a new officer or two can liven things up.

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

Imagine you are an elemental shaman. You notice that Arathi Basin is on Call to Arms and decide to queue up. You've got a bit of a crazy streak in you, so you decide to head up to the Lumber Mill. You're new to the path of the shaman and are still experimenting with your abilities. The battle is getting pretty overwhelming, and you know you don't have a lot of health. You really don't want that warrior getting too close. You decide to throw out a Thunderbolt in an attempt keep some distance and watch in awe as the warrior's frustrated body sails beautifully through the air and off the cliff to meet his certain demise below.

That was awesome!

You've just found your purpose in WoW. After the BG, you relate your experience to your friends. Before you know it, you've got a group of elemental shaman and boomkins queuing up for Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm with no other purpose in mind than to knock as many people to their deaths as possible. Unfortunately for the rest of your frustrated team, you don't care about winning or losing; you are having the time of your life.

While it certainly is fun to have the best gear, down the toughest raid bosses, or reach that next Arena rating, sometimes we all need to step back from the seriousness and remind ourselves that we are playing a game. Sometimes we need to take a break from the emblem grinding and talent tweaking and just do something that makes us laugh until our sides ache.

Whether it's forming a knockback brigade, repeatedly jumping off high cliffs, or dueling while under the influence of in-game alcohol, tell us what you do when you just want to have a good time.

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Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? C. Christian Moore, multiple Rank 1 Gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in Blood Sport.

My internet is still down. Yes, this has been two weeks of hell. No Google, no easy check on the weather (I have a motorcycle), no instant directions -- and most importantly, no images or videos of scantily clad ... orcs. World of Warcraft has been out of my bloodstream for yet another week.

Having fun in arena is one aspect I don't necessarily need a WoW window open to write about, so we're going to cover some bases that I might have forgotten last week -- namely, how to be a good teammate and encourage a fun atmosphere, and having fun while both winning and losing.

Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 Gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in Blood Sport.

My internet is down this week (lame!), so I'll be writing about a topic near to my heart: having fun in the arena. I was originally going to write about how to make the best use of your time in WoW when you don't have much of it, but then I thought two things:

1. Everyone spends time in game differently. Some people like PVE, some PVP, some prefer the auction house, and others (mindbogglingly) enjoy reputation grinding. For me to throw out a list of how to best use your time would be madness, absolute madness.
2. Considering we are WoW players, making the best use of your time might not be the most well-received article.

This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider.

We've all experienced it: You're walking into Orgrimmar or Ironforge, intent on visiting the auction house to spend that gold jingling in your pocket, when suddenly you stop dead, dumbstruck. Your jaw goes slightly slack as you /awe in wonder. A strange creature unlike anything you've encountered before is dancing in the town square and emoting kisses to everyone nearby. A crowd has gathered. People are cheering. "That's neat ... and maybe a little weird," you silently muse as you crack a smile and continue on your way.

I'm talking about player costumes. When the skin of your orc, troll, gnome or draenei becomes too heavy a burden, plenty of opportunities exist for a brief stay in the body of another creature (unless you're a druid, in which case you change forms all the time). These devices, elixirs and enchantments come in many shapes and stack sizes, but one key element runs through them all: They're a blast for the light-hearted player inside each of us.

Ever wondered where they're from and how to get them? Wonder no more! Without further ado, I present five of the most delightfully awesome, portable, use-anywhere player costumes of all time. With Hallow's End just around the corner, you're sure to find something here that will suit you as you strut through your city of choice, sipping from a bottle of Autumnal Acorn Ale.

Do you find healing fun? Are healing "rotations" going to be needed?

I mean, obviously you find healing fun if you've been playing a healer for a while. You enjoy the challenges, the reflexive nature of the role, and the potential adrenaline rush. Hopefully, you're not being forced to play a healer because your group doesn't have enough others to do it. I know I curse myself when I screw up and let one of my players die. It's something I take seriously because I enjoy healing.

As we're all aware, the switch to Cataclysm will yield a shift in healing philosophy and execution. I know some players have expressed either reluctance or caution because of fears that this new style of healing will not be fun in comparison to current or older models of healing.

Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player with limited playtime. Of course, you people with lots of playtime can read this too, but you may get annoyed by the fact that we are unashamed, even proud, of the fact that beating WoW isn't our highest priority. Take solace in the fact that your gear is better than ours, but if that doesn't work, remember that we outnumber you. Not that that's a threat, after all, we don't have time to do anything about it. But if WoW were a democracy, we'd win.

I'm letting you into my thought process again this week, because I think I'm one of many players with limited playtime asking themselves if they are still having fun in WoW.

Me: I hate that video. Stormtroopers are cold, impersonal evil -- they don't dance!

Myself: I love it! Yay!

I: I don't know. I just don't know.

Me: So here we are again.

I: Yep. The List is pretty obsolete right now until I do more playtesting and research.

Myself: Playing WoW is fun!

Me: Is it? Still?

I: I don't know.

Myself: Yes it is!

Me: Prove it.

It was just on Sunday that we first heard about a Guild Christmas special, and now here it is. The Guild gang have decided that the web series thing isn't really happening with the money, so they're taking the advice of commenters and selling out with six different pieces of merchandise, one for each Guild member. They're actually pretty funny, from a Codex "answer Orb" to a talking Tinkerballa doll to a Vork unbreakable bank (unfortunately, all of the items have been recalled for various reasons). There's some cool guest stars in the mix as well -- see if you can spot Heroes' James Kyson Lee (in a Delorean!) and our buddy Alex Albrecht, along with a few other familiar faces.

Good stuff, and man, The Guild crew is getting really good at making some quality video. No word whether these will show up on Xbox Live at all (they're actually out now on YouTube, so this may just be something the guys did for fun, outside of the Microsoft agreement), but you can watch them all right now above. Merry Christmas, guildies! All I really want for Christmas is a Vork unbreakable bank -- in these troubled times, it's really the safest thing to do with your hard earned money.

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Like The Guild? We do, too! We've got all the episodes of season 3 posted: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and episode 12 above. We've also chatted with all of the folks at BlizzCon, including Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh, and Jeff Lewis and Michele Boyd. And as if that wasn't enough Guild, here's the liveblog of their panel, and the guys were nice enough to stop by our meetup as well. Stay tuned for more Guild here on WoW.com!

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Felicia Day told us back at BlizzCon that she was going to go undercover for a little while as The Guild's latest season wrapped up, but undercover for this woman seems to mean that she's only in two TV shows and prepping for a comic book release. She showed up in last night's Lie to Me episode, singing, and in this interview over at Newsarama from the Video Game Awards with Sandeep Parikh (who himself just showed up in Tiki Bar TV -- slightly NSFW, language) she says she's still working on the unfortunately canceled Dollhouse as well. So that's where Eliza Dushku got her addiction from.

She also says that the Dark Horse published Guild comic book is due out in spring of next year -- Jim Rugg is working on the art right now -- and fans of The Guild may even get a little Christmas present from the show and Microsoft. We'll keep an eye out for that for sure. So even though we're in between seasons (and we assume that season 4 is upcoming next year, even though we haven't heard an official announcement on that yet), there's lots of Guild goodness to go around.

The long-awaited Dungeon Finder is finally out on the servers, and people have had a few days with it now, so let's jump in and gauge some early reactions. Overall, it seems to be a big hit -- tanks and healers are jumping into groups right away, and while we've heard of longer waits for DPS, it doesn't seem bad at all. While of course the initial flood of people brought instance servers down (I'd expect to see the same thing happen during peak time this weekend), everything seems to be working well since then: disenchanters are correctly dropping items out, loot is getting distributed correctly, and groups are doing what they were always supposed to do: rake in the badges and rewards for players.

Hots and Dots actually has a long take on the Dungeon Finder, including "15 Things You Should Know," like that tanks and healers are still as important as ever (if you sign up for DPS and another role, you likely won't be doing DPS), and that we're finding out very quickly just how skilled or knowledgeable people really are ("the Party Leader will be forced to confess midway [through] that they actually know nothing about the instance").

It's that time of year again -- if you (like me) haven't gotten gifts for everyone on your list, it's time to start scrambling to find something nice to get under the tree this year. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about finding something good for the World of Warcraft fan in your life: we've got you covered there. In the gallery below, we've got a nice bunch of gift ideas for everything Warcraft, from the cheap to the expensive, from the silly to the practical, from in-game presents you can wrap with shiny paper, to out-of-game classics that you can... also wrap with shiny paper. If you need to give a gift to a WoW player this year, you'll find it below for sure.

And if you happen to be a Warcraft player, faced with the annual awkward question of "What do you want me to give you this year?", just feel free to drop this link surreptitiously as a reply, maybe even with a hint or two towards a specific item. We've included links to everything and kept it easy to understand even for someone who hasn't visited Azeroth before. That's our gift to you. Happy holidays, and good gift hunting!

A few readers sent us this post over at Border House that has laid bare (heh) the oft-mentioned differences in armor between the genders in World of Warcraft. While there are some exceptions, in most cases, the exact same set of armor (like this chestplate above) shows up as much more skimpy on female characters than it does on male characters. To the point of absurdity in some places -- even plate leggings, designed to serve as solid protection to the legs, appear to be more like plate thong underwear on the ladies.

As Border House points out, this isn't just WoW's problem. Fantasy and sci-fi in general have been the domain of boys in the past (even if that is changing quickly), and the sexual depictions in the genre have reflected that, for both traditional and financial reasons. As I pointed out the other day, all of Blizzard's luminaries thus far have been men -- is it any surprise that the game is designed from a mostly male perspective? And as BH also says, fortunately, WoW has lots of different gear. If you don't like what your character is wearing, then you can find something else.