Posts with tag naxx-10

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week we start to wonder where the hell all the +hit from "Burning Crusade" went.

Greetings, fellow Druids, and welcome to another installment on Wrath gear at 80, and this week it's the boomkins' turn. Next week I'm going to tackle Bear gear at 80; Dan O'Halloran will take care of our Cat colleagues.

As a number of people have observed, it's tougher to get +hit-capped pre-raid in leather as opposed to cloth, so you're going to find an awful lot of cloth on the list. I realize this represents a new and exciting development in the history of moonkin itemization. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. That's French for "We're screwed."

Supplementary reading:

• Elitist Jerks' threads on Balance trinkets, Moonkin DPS spreadsheet, general issues, and Balance talents and specs.

• Gray Matter on necessary stats at 80 and raiding moonkin gear.
  

• As a note here concerning the recent news on Improved Faerie Fire (in a nutshell, you'll get the 3% crit no matter whose FF is up on a target, even a feral's), Gray Matter on why the talent's worth taking, and Macbook on the raid circumstances in which it might not be.

As with our previous entry on pre-raid Restoration gear at 80, these guides assume that you do not presently have access to either 10-man or 25-man raids.

We probably have at least an hour (or seven) of maintenance and downtime before realms start coming back up, so this is as good a time as any to make a nice list of the Wrath of the Lich King gear guides we've done so far. Not every class and spec is complete, but progress is progress, right?

If you don't see the spec/role you're looking for in our list below, never fear! Our columnists are always working on these things, and the best inspiration for all of our writers is knowing what everyone is looking for. Don't see what you're looking for? Just let us know. Don't be afraid to look at guides for similar classes, either. They might just have the information you need. For example, the Shadow Priest spell hit guide will work for most casters.

But enough talk, on with the show!

Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, ZA or Sunwell Plateau, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. This week, we unwisely decide to give the column to Allison "Oops, I forgot my frost resist" Robert. Not that you actually need frost resist gear for the Construct Quarter...but that's about the time she generally remembers she left hers in the bank.

Greetings, folks. Jennie's off for January, so I'll be writing Ready Check this month. Today's installment got a little long, mostly because Patchwerk tends to be a stumbling block to guilds still gearing up in Naxxramas, and Grobbulus is a little complicated to describe. So tonight I'll post on the first two bosses in the Construct Quarter, and tomorrow I'll finish with Gluth and Thaddius. Next week we'll take a look at Sapphiron and Kel'thuzad in order to finish off Naxx.

The Construct, or Abomination, Quarter of Naxxramas contains two of the raid's most storied fights in the form of Patchwerk and Thaddius. It additionally contains some of the raid's most storied trash in the form of the Frogger Hallway directly after Patchwerk. As Jennie says, if you want to experience the encounters unspoiled, don't read any further!

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week we take a look at how to gear a PvE Restoration Druid at level 80, in the hopes of preventing other trees from suffering our fate during our first 10-man Naxx run, which -- no, no, it's too painful even to think about. Pass the schnapps.

EDIT: This guide has been updated for patch 3.3 and Icecrown content. Please click here for a guide on gearing a new restoration druid as of May 2010.

Greetings readers, and welcome to Wrath Gear-A-Palooza 2009. We'll be running one of these for each Druid spec.

I'm not going to "rank" gear numerically, because I think that's a fairly unhelpful means of organizing items when your access to all of them as a fresh 80 may be very limited. Generally you're going to have access to quest rewards and faction gear before you get access to badge pieces or oft-uncooperative heroic drops, so I've organized the list by where you can get particular drops. It's generally safe to assume that a heroic drop is better than a blue you're using from an Icecrown quest, but not always. If you're starting to move into higher levels of gear, I found the following links to be incredibly helpful, and I hope you do too:

• HoTsTree's gear list
• Resto4Life's post on Wowhead filters and pre-raid gear in the main slots
• Elitist Jerks post on Restoration Itemization and PvE Healing as a Druid

Otherwise, assuming a proper spec, gems, and enchants, you can successfully heal any of the game's 5-man or raid content (10-man or 25-man) with a healing set derived from the following list. That's a promise. This list assumes that you do not have access to 10- or 25-man raids for the time being and are gearing up primarily through questing, 5-mans, and heroics.

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, our author is completely spaced out on cold medication, and is somewhat concerned that her raid performance has improved under the circumstances.

The time has come (the Allie said)
To talk of many things.
Of Roots and Bash and Travel Form,
And Strength (which scales with Kings).
Why Tauren cat form sucks so hard,
And whether trees have wings!

And, yes, before anyone asks, I'm tripping on too much cough syrup and ibuprofen after receiving a belated viral Christmas gift from a relative. So I'll just put this out there right now; this column's probably on the weird side. I took a long look at all three Druid specs over 2008 and saw a few sad things, a few happy things, a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants, and now I'm channeling the famous Mary Tyler Moore episode "Chuckles Bites the Dust," and that has to stop because I do not believe Mary Tyler Moore ever played a Druid.

If you're completely uninterested in reading an account of any spec that's not your own -- although that would make me weep into my little cup of generic label cough syrup -- here's a set of quick links to each:

• Balance
• Feral
• Resto

I really didn't expect to be writing this. Like others, I was left a bit nonplussed at the seeming ease of early raiding content in Wrath, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an interesting intersection of prudence, circumstances, and quite possibly some residual discomfort on Blizzard's part over how awful early BC raiding was. I don't think that the current "ease" of first-tier raid content in Wrath is a bad thing -- and I also don't expect future content to stay that way.

My guild cleared all of the 25-man raid content in Wrath within two weeks of the expansion's release. Naxxramas was easily the biggest non-surprise. Doing Naxx-25 in the company of people who know the place inside and out is a pretty straightforward and -- dare I say it -- easy process. This is even more true with players who learned the original Naxx at 70, with a much greater margin for error than they would have had at 60. Honestly? Most of the fights haven't changed to the point where you'd have to toss out your previous strategy and start all over again. A raid that saw Naxx at any point between 60 and 70 is effectively an old dog that doesn't have to learn a new trick.

It's been a few days, you know how this goes by now. You ask your questions in the comments section below, I answer them in the near future. Got it? Good.

jared.daniels asked...

I just got to level 72 last night and realized that I have five different dailies that I can do in Northrend. Should I bother doing all of those every day, or just focus on the last one that I uncovered? And if I do go back, how long should I do them before I drop them for higher-level dailies?

I'm going to start off this AABT by stealing a question that Alex actually took last time, mostly because I started laughing when I read it yesterday. I have, oh, conservatively, billions of Wrath screenshots on my hard drive at this point, but there's one I remember all too well.

Marathan asks...

Some time ago, there was a talk about new player character models for Wrath - and even some bugged pictures. So the question is, are they going live? Are we finally going to get improved graphics on our characters?

As Alex wrote, Blizzard used one beta build to test the ease of implementing new skins and some of them...didn't turn out too well. Imagine you're me and you get a beta key. Budget a few hours of anticipatory excitement while your main copies over. She's a 70 Tauren Druid who has been with you since day one, your sole 70, and you think she's the most beautiful thing in the game even if to everyone else she's an ungainly 8-foot heifer. Now imagine booting up the Wrath beta for the first time and being horrified to see your beloved character with a Glasgow smile, like the developers had seen the Joker in The Dark Knight and thought, "Hey! We could make that work!"

Holy water did nothing. Neither did crucifixes, garlic, a wooden stake, waving the Bible in the direction of the laptop, or sobbing quietly in a corner.

On the plus side, here was finally something in the game to which Tauren cat form was an actual graphical improvement.

Someone on the forums noticed what at first appeared to be an oversight: Rusted-Link Spiked Gauntlets, from Grand Widow Faerlina in Naxx-10, are tagged as BoE, not BoP as most boss drops are. As it turns out, this is intended. According to Blizzard poster Verimonde, each boss will have one BoE item on its loot table. This has a few obvious benefits, as Verimonde points out:

• More trickle-down items from raiding - non-raiders, be they alts, friends, or just random AH patrons, get access to a few raid items
• More excitement - even if nobody needs anything from the boss, there's still a chance to get a potentially lucrative BoE (and badges, of course)
• Another income source for raid guilds

Although it isn't mentioned specifically, I expect that this BoE philosophy will extend to all raid bosses in Wrath. I think it's a nice idea. Let's say the average 10-man boss has a 12-item loot table and drops 2 items from it plus badges. If one of these items is made BoE, there's roughly a 17% chance to get it, which sounds reasonable.

My question: what will raids' loot rules be for BoEs? My guild typically does open rolls for BoE items that aren't needed by anyone present, so that's probably what we'll do. But how will DKP guilds handle it? Will people who need it for their alts get precedence? Will they be auctioned off and the funds added to the guild bank, if nobody needs them? I guess it'll vary depending on the guild. But between these BoEs and Heirloom items buyable with badges, raiding is going to be a lot more interesting for those of us with many alts.

So I'm hearing that there are tons of quests in all areas, has the allowable number of quests in your quest log expanded or should we all start getting those last 10 or so completed?

The number of quests you can have in your log is still limited to 25. If you stick to one zone at a time, it's very highly unlikely you'll ever have more than 15-20 quests in your log at once. If you're anything like I am though, curiosity will probably get the best of you and you'll end up questing in 2-3 different places at once and you'll need that space in your quest log.

You might want to finish up the quests you have now, or when Wrath comes around you can scribble down where you got them, abandon them and go back later.

The ten-man version of Naxxramas was enabled in last night's beta patch, including loot. And thanks to insomniac beta testers and to MMO-Champion, we now get to see a whole bunch of that loot, including class sets, which is what I'm most interested in at the moment. The class sets aren't quite finished yet – their names are things like "Naxxramas 10 Rogue Set," and there aren't any set bonuses – but it's still interesting to see what sort of stats Blizz is planning on giving us.

Some observations:

• The item level on all this stuff is 200; Kil'jaeden's drops are ilvl 164.
• Given that two tiers are typically about 14 ilvls apart, this implies that when we see Naxx-25 loot it will probably be ilvl 214 or so.
• I know that we've got spell power now, and no +healing, but it still took me a few minutes to figure out why I couldn't find a healing weapon.
• Melee one-handed weapons are doing 143 DPS; by comparison, Hand of the Deceiver, from Kil'jaeden, does 114 (the highest currently available in a one-handed weaopn).
• I don't like to see items with shield block on them that aren't shields (Deflection Band, Waistguard of the Tutor), since only half of the tanks can use them.
• There's an oddly large amount of crit rating on the Priest healing set. Is this a consequence of some change I haven't quite digested yet?

Anyway, this all looks good; go look at the items yourself at MMO-Champion. I can't wait to see what they're going to do with tokens, and to see some of the Naxx-25 stuff start to drop.