Posts with tag meta

The Midsummer Fire Festival begins today. Pyromaniacs, activate! The Fire Festival is a full-featured holiday complete with dailies that mostly involve torches, achievements that mostly involve setting fire to things, and a title that has the word Flame.

Ahune The Frost Lord is the boss to kill for this holiday (since he's not so big on fire). You have to ice him if you want to get the meta for the Fire Festival, which is part of What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been.

What the Midsummer Fire Festival also involves: traveling, more traveling, world PvP, and traveling. I highly recommend celebrating the holiday with friends, though maybe not quite so many as that one time.

My goal is for my druid to finally complete it, to be one step closer to the Violet Proto-Drake. The It came from the Blog family of guilds will also be hosting a Fire Festival event, like we do every year. Stay tuned for an announcement soon™.

What are your goals for the Midsummer Fire Festival? Are you going to go for the meta? Is there a particular item you are trying to get? Or are you going to ignore it completely? (Bah, humbug!)

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Good news for people who've been sick to death of Cataclysm's terrible meta-gem requirements (read: everyone): Blizzard has made its promised changes to Chaotic and Relentless gem types in patch 4.0.6, making both require three red gems. But that's not all! There are also three brand new meta-gems coming with the new patch, giving DPS classes a boost to their main stat and 3% increased crit damage. Good changes all around.

The full text of the announcement is below. Check out the full 4.0.6 PTR patch notes (so far) here.

Jewelcrafting

• Meta gems with the Chaotic and Relentless prefixes now have a requirement of 3 red gems.
• New meta gems have been added: Agile Shadowspirit Diamond (Agility/3% critical damage), Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond (Strength/3% critical damage), and Burning Shadowspirit Diamond (Intellect/3% critical damage). These new recipes are unbound and can drop from any Cataclysm creature. The new meta gems have a requirement of 3 red gems equipped.

source

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

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It's official. I'm a Fool for Love. Now all I need is the Lunar Festival, Children's Week and Midsummer Fire Festival metas in order to get What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been.

What about you? Are you still going for the Violet Proto-Drake? Did you get a Big Love Rocket Mount? What were your goals for Love is in the Air and did you get them accomplished?

Also, did you like the changes to the quests and achievements this year? My favorite change was the Goblin Detective quest chain. Goblin running FTW! What was your favorite part of the new event?

We had a bit of a minor freakout when we heard that the Rusted and Ironbound protodrakes might be getting removed as rewards for the Ulduar meta achievements in Patch 3.2, and then even more of one when the slow trickle of information about 3.2 turned into a firehose. Bornakk mentioned the change initially with the caveat that it was their intention to remove the drakes eventually, but that he'd seek definite confirmation either way as to whether it was happening in 3.2 or not. There's been no update about it in the past few weeks.

Well, after a thorough reading of the 3.2 patch notes, I don't see a single trace of anything saying the drakes are getting removed. At the risk of counting my protochickens before they hatch, I think we might be safe, given how fast 3.2 looks like it's coming out.

This is at least a relief for my guild, who's doing pretty well on 10-man hard-mode progression but ... is there a word worse than "dismal"? ... on 25-man hard-modes. Maybe there's hope for us yet.

Should we get the soul-crushing confirmation that they'll be removed with 3.2, we'll be sure to let you know. There's still a lot of time for change on this one, though -- maybe it was an accidental omission, maybe it'll get decided on later -- but for now, you can breathe a little easier knowing you might be able to keep hacking away at those hard modes to get your undeniably awesome drakes even after the Argent Coliseum is commanding your guild's attention.

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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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Who wants to go start a WoW based mud with me?

Jeni asked...

"Regarding the shift in glyphs...what happens if you want to use a Glyph of Levitate in both specs? What if you don't care enough about your off spec to get new glyphs each time you switch specs (for instance, keep your holy glyphs when you switch specs to shadow to quest?) Does it eat up your glyphs anyhow?"

EDIT: Bornakk says that the achievement will be replaced in the meta achievement with one that requires you to simply sign up for the Brew of the Month Club. And for those who doubted my psychic powers: Noblegarden achievements are being added to Long, Strange Trip.

Following the pattern of removing achievements that take a while to complete from the holiday meta-achievements, Blizzard yanked Brew of the Year from Brewmaster on the current 3.1 PTR. This means that anyone who was missing it now has yet another fair shake at getting their Violet Proto-Drake for completing all of the other holiday achievements for What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been.

I'm pleased that players who missed that one achievement can still have a shot at the big prize, but man, there seems to be an awful lot of meta-achievement caving lately. It just creates the impression that complaining about something will get it changed, and I don't think that's what Blizzard wants players to believe.

To be fair, it was physically impossible for Death Knights to get this achievement until sometime in 2010. This is a good change for them and I'm okay with that. And no, I'm not against Blizzard removing unfair achievements from reward-bearing metas. This was also the only achievement which was impossible to complete during the event itself.

We'll see if the pattern holds after people miss another impossible-to-miss achievement in the Noblegarden set.

Grats to those for whom this achievement change will make a difference, and early props for your purple dragon.

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly dose of Death Knight discussion.

Now that we've covered most standard pemutations of gear gathering in past Lichborne columns, I figured this week would be a good time to start talking about taking the extra steps to really trick out your gear. This week, will focus on gems. Not only will this help you take your gear to the next level, but it gives me a good excuse to talk about some new discoveries and discussions going on as we try to figure out the best ways to squeeze the most DPS out of a Death Knight. So to start, let's talk about which statistics you'll want to focus on when you gem.

Welcome to this week's edition of Scattered Shots, which is dedicated to shiny things and dust.

So by now you've seen our normal dungeon gear guide, our heroic dungeon gear guide, our reputation gear guide, and our holiday gift guide. Between all of them, you should be able to put together a nice solid set of gear that should let you tackle 10-man Naxxramas pretty easily. But grabbing the gear is the easy part. To go the extra mile, you need to grab those gems and enchantments. Let's look at some of the best gems and enchantments you can take along to secure your place in the DPS charts in Naxxramas.

Why do we feel compelled to spill out our guts all over the intertubes for the entire world to read? The answer, of course, is a subset of the larger question, why do people blog about anything? It's probably a variation of the same question that medieval bards asked the operators of the first printing press: "Dude, why do you want to put yourself so, I don't know, out there?"

The "serious" answers get all sociological and some junk. We want to be heard popping off about our opinions on talent trees, bragging about one-shots, or feeling part of the larger WoW community outside our own servers.

However, as a WoW blogger myself, I know that the truth about us isn't nearly that pretty. We blog to brag about Kara exploits or show off our expertise on the Hunter class, a frame addon, or prime Oily Blackmouth fishing spots . We dream of demi-celebrity status in the WoW community. We try to provoke people into replying, sometimes with generous link love. We like to have the first scoop on expansion news (essentially, more showing off). We gossip about guild drama, sometimes wrapped up snuggly in the ignorance of our fellow guildies that we even have a blog. (There is a sweet freedom in finding the comfort of internet strangers.) We blog for artistic expression and to make others laugh.

And the main reason we blog? The same reason we feel itchy when we haven't called Mom in a few weeks: guilt.

Last week, Insider Trader began the journey from 300 to 375 jewelcrafting skill. While we were able to avoid using recipes that required faction reputation or that had to be farmed, the cheapest methods to 375 from about 365 may require a bit more effort to obtain.

If you are like so many other craftsmen, stuck with 375 seeming far away and expensive, then carry on through the break to examine ways to not only maximize your skills, but to attempt to make a profit while doing so, rather than running on a loss.

Featuring several distinct ways to reach 375, you will find that you have many choices to suit your own needs, your guild's needs, and your server's market. In addition, I've put together some links for further reading that you should find helpful.

What do you do for WoW Insider?

I'm a regular blogger. Right now, I'm the chronically late co-writer for Know Your Lore, the paladin column The Light and How to Swing It, and the rogue column Encrypted Text. I swear to Thrall there will finally be a new KYL this week. I also contributed to Arcane Brilliance for a short time until I realized that I don't really like playing a mage. I used to do a lot of short pieces on the forums and social aspects of WoW, but due to a new work schedule, those have decreased in recent months.

What's your main right now?

Right now, I have no main. Kelstar, the troll rogue pictured above, was my first character and the only one I've seriously raided on. I recently leveled a blood elf protadin, Sandinista, and am in the process of building up an undead affliction warlock, Sabra. All these characters are on Magtheridon-US. Yes, I am fully aware that my gear, rep, spec, appearance and entire being suck, so don't bother to look up my characters and tell me that. Most recently, I've been working on a new class, faction and server -- Mehitabel is my lowbie night elf druid on Warsong. WTS Blood Elf Bandit Mask plz.

A simple topic, but so difficult to figure out the answer to. If you could go back to when you first played WoW and give yourself some advice (WoW-related only, you can't tell yourself not to date that skeezy dude with the '80s hair from the Rockford), what would you tell yourself?

In retrospect, I probably would have advised myself not to make a Rogue as my first character to level. They're a nice class, but having a primary Rogue made it difficult to get into groups and raids. I would have made a Druid or Priest instead.

Additionally, I would have never tried to level in Silverpine Forest, entered Stromgarde Keep, or tried to solo all the seven billion elite quests before Outlands. I would have never tried to raid hardcore, and generally spent less time thinking about loot and more time cooking deviate fish.

What would you do differently if you started WoW again?

Ahhhh, how I love the Elitist Jerks forums, the home of the most intelligent, informed, and well-written players of WoW. EJ produced another gem of a topic recently that made me think a bit about the purpose of sites like ours, and what function they serve in the overall scheme of WoW.

Malan, who plays the tauren shaman Keiji on Skullcrusher, recently posted in a thread on the shaman forums about an upcoming patch. Rather than complain about shaman mechanics, however, he asked the community manager Nethaera an important meta-question: If most WoW players don't read the forums, and the forums are the main way the developers and community managers tell new information to the player base, then isn't there a huge gap in communication for most players?

New to WoW Insider and want to know what's in our back catalogue? Looking for our more reference-oriented posts? We know stories and features drop off the front page all too quickly and search isn't always the best way to find something, so we're always looking for ways to give you access to some of our older content that's still informative. We've started a new WoW Insider directory page to help you find some of our best guides, resources and original features. Is there a guide we haven't done yet that you'd like to see? Let us know what you want to know in the comments!

WoW Insider directory

There's a fairly familiar troll thread on the WoW Europe forums -- the usual "people who play WoW are wasting their lives" spiel. "I am worried that people are, and will, lose the best years of their real life to WoW," writes Anti. "... In my experience, between 18-21 are the best years of your life, partying, girls, going mad, you get the idea...those years can never be replaced ... Most people WILL look back at some stage in their lives and regret the real life they threw away to play Warcraft. And if they dont think it was wasted time, and still regard it as time well spent, their present life at that time must be sad."

The thread has a lot of responses, from people regretting the time they've spent in WoW to celebrating that they didn't waste their youth drinking and partying. So that inspires me to ask: Overall, has WoW been a positive or negative force in your life? Do you regret the time you've spent on WoW, or consider it a good investment?

I've been playing WoW for two years now, and I don't really regret the time I've spent on it. I don't neglect my real-life responsibilities to play, I haven't become a lump attached to a keyboard, and in many ways, WoW has actually enhanced my real life. I've met tons of people who I would never have occasion to meet out in the world. I visited a new city to meet some guildmates, and liked it so much that I ended up moving here. WoW helped me get a writing job and opened up new career opportunities. Heck, WoW even helped me learn French, although most of what I learned was raid instructions and curse words. Sure, I sometimes get scared when I realize my /played on all my characters is in the triple digits, but if I hadn't played WoW, I would have just watched TV or stared at the ceiling.

What about you? Has WoW been a good thing or a bad thing for you?