Posts with tag ignis-the-furnace-master

Shadow Priests have been up in arms all over the official forums recently, and it seems to have reached a bit of a breaking point. Rather than waiting for the official Priest Q&A in the developers' Q&A series, Ghostcrawler chimed into an unofficial Q&A thread to give some insight. Since it's unofficial, the questions asked are very direct and specific, aimed at the posters in that thread rather than the playerbase as a whole. Still, the tone is mostly the same: Don't expect major announcements while reading the thread, it's more a discussion on class direction and philosophy rather than patch news. That being said, there is some good news in the whole thing. Some bad news, too.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing on the official forums, but I'm going to pull out some bits and pieces here.

The first big thing that jumped out to me was in response to a question regarding Haste and DoTs. Have they considered DoTs scaling with Haste? Ghostcrawler says... yes! It's something they're apparently actively discussing. That doesn't guarantee we'll see it, but the fact that they're talking about it is promising.

I know, it's another Retribution post, but since we got hit with the nerf bat again (ever so slightly) I decided to devote one last column to the spec before I rotate back to Protection. Besides, my past month or so has been spent raiding Ulduar as Retribution (with the first few forays as Holy) so I think that's what I'll talk about for now. Rather than talk about specific boss strategies, we'll talk about the little things we can do to perform at our best in Ulduar.

Flame Leviathan
First up is Flame Leviathan. Obviously, none of the usual strategies will apply here but one key point players should remember is that the vehicles scale with gear. This means having to prepare an outfit set optimized for the encounter. One thing to note about vehicle scaling is that it doesn't look at stats, just iLevel. Optimizing a gear set for this means putting the highest iLevel item you have in every slot. For "pure" classes, this is usually their normal set-up, but for Paladins who keep several sets of gear, an iLevel-optimized outfit can be composed of healing items, a few tank items, some DPS items, and even PvP gear. Players can use AddOns such as RatingBuster to determine an item's iLevel and outfit managers such as Outfitter or Blizzard's new in-game equipment manager to quickly swap gear.

Servers are still getting stabilized, players are reporting bugs left and right, and in general, it's the day after patchmas. So it's not too surprising that we're seeing some hotfixes. So far, here's what Blizz have let us know about:

• Ulduar:
• XT-002 Deconstructor's heart aggro radius lowered to 60 yards.
• Trash before XT-002 Deconstructor disabled temporarily, because there was a problem with them being linked.
• Shattering a Construct during the Ignis the Furnace Master encounter will now decrease the number of Strength of the Creator stack buffs he has by one.
• Conflagrate nerfed to do 70% of Immolate's total periodic damage instantly, down from 100%.

The last point is the most significant. The stated reasoning is that destruction is too bursty in PvP, which seems to have been the reasoning for half of the changes we've seen in WotLK. I hear this nerf was not unexpected - Warlocks, how do you feel about it? Was this change deserved?

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, our author pretends to know more about Ulduar than she actually does, which makes a refreshing change from pretending to know more than she actually does about things that are already in the game.

Hail and well met, Druids. For the next three Shifting Perspectives columns, I'm going to take a look at Druid class roles on Ulduar fights. If patch 3.1 hits earlier than expected (I'm currently betting that it hits in late April/early May), I'll try to squeeze these in a little bit faster than once per week. But with luck (and, I hope, a parade of annoying bugs for Blizzard to hunt down and squash before they let the patch go live), we should have some information to chew on before we set foot in a live Ulduar.

Now watch Blizzard deploy the frickin' patch next week.

I have not gotten the opportunity to test all of these fights personally because I'm only on the North American PTR, and some fights -- like Yogg-Saron -- haven't been available for testing at all. What I write here is going to be a compilation of personal experience, details concerning boss abilities available on the PTR version of Wowhead, information I've gotten from pestering various people on both PTR's, and news available around the web, principally from WoW Insider's previous PTR testing, Wowwiki, MMO Champion, and World of Raids. Bear in mind that some things here may wind up being very different when Ulduar actually goes live, so take numbers and conjecture here with a grain of salt. I'm going to assume that basic boss mechanics are likely to remain the same or similar, so let's get started with the first three encounters.

The last couple days of Ulduar testing have been a wash, delays and cancellations cutting things short. As mentioned by the developers when they announced the cancellation of the EU's Auriaya testing, recent tweaks and retuning hadn't yet made it to the PTR, they were contained in a future build that hadn't hit those servers yet. Really, it would be rather pointless to test those bosses. Due to this, they've pushed back all testing and changed up the testing schedule. Testing is now on hold until tomorrow, which means that either this evening or tomorrow morning, we'll be seeing a new build on the PTR.

North American realms:

• Friday, 3/13, 4PM PDT: Mimiron
• Saturday, 3/14, 4PM PDT: Hodir
• Sunday, 3/15, 11AM PDT: Flame Leviathan
• Monday, 3/16, 4PM PDT: Ignis the Furnace Master
• Tuesday, 3/17, 4PM PDT: XT-002 Deconstructor
• Wednesday, 3/18, 4PM PDT: Kologarn
  

European realms:

• Friday, 3/13, 19:00 CET: Mimiron
• Saturday, 3/14, 19:00 CET: Auriaya
• Sunday, 3/15, 19:00 CET: Flame Leviathan
• Monday, 3/16, 19:00 CET: General Vezax
• Tuesday, 3/17, 19:00 CET: Thorim
• Wednesday, 3/18, 19:00 CET: Freya

Again, this is the new testing schedule for the upcoming week, and the one that was passed around yesterday should be disregarded.

We dropped the ball a little bit by failing to post about this week's Ulduar testing schedule yesterday when Daelo posted it to the official forums, but that's alright. We didn't miss much. Last night was just more Hodir testing. The rest of the week should prove more interesting, because they're re-testing a couple of bosses that were pretty widely considered much too easy, like Ignis the Furnace Master, which I hear received a little extra testing last night for some reason. Again, both the US and EU realms are getting their own testing schedule.

North American realms:

• Wednesday, 3/11 (today), 4 PM PDT: Mimiron
• Thursday, 3/12, 4 PM PDT: Ignis the Furnace Master
• Friday, 3/13, 4 PM PDT: XT-002 Deconstructor
• Saturday, 3/14, 4PM PDT: Kologarn
• Sunday, 3/15, 11 AM PDT: Flame Leviathan

European realms:

• Wednesday, 3/11, 19:00 CET: Auriaya
• Thursday, 3/12, 19:00 CET: Mimiron
• Friday, 3/13, 19:00 CET: Thorim
• Saturday, 3/14, 19:00 CET: General Vezax
• Sunday, 3/15, 19:00 CET: Flame Leviathan

I don't believe we've seen anything about Auriaya yet, so that's what I'm looking forward to the most. We haven't seen much of Mimiron either, but we already know he's just another mechagnome. Gotta say, not a fan of the mechagnomes.