Posts with tag obsidian-sanctum

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

So how many people do you know that pronounce it "kweh" instead of "kyoo"? All it does is give me chocobos on the brain.


Boredbetweenclasses asked...

"When WotLK came out the design of the Chamber of Aspects seemed to imply that there would be at least five bosses, with one for each flight, as there are five gate points which all have two guardians of each flight. (Though the question remains as to why, as mortals, we'd even want to fight against the last three good-aligned dragonflights.) But over a year later with talk of Cataclysm coming soon we still only have The Obsidian Sanctum as an encounter there. Is there any indication of expanding the raid content within the Chamber in the future?"

The Chamber of the Aspects was, I believe, an area that was added as a contingency plan in case there needed to be some emergency raid content -- dragon encounters are comparatively easy to whip up compared to others, and the entrance area is already there.

Tom Chilton recently indicated that we might get a new one-shot raid in the Ruby Sanctum before Cataclysm launches, though, so if you've got a hankerin' for another fight where you avoid breaths, cleaves, and tail whips, you might be in luck.

Any caster worth their salt can remember the frustration involved in trying to nab the elusive Illustration of the Dragon Soul trinket from Sartharion in the Obsidian Sanctum. We tried everything we could to get it, from creating our own melee-heavy raid groups, to participating only in "3D zerg" runs hoping that participants would be too over-geared to want it, to participating in Less Is More achievement runs just so there would be less competition for it.

Towards the end of the Patch 3.2 days, people would run OS25 once a week just to try and get that one trinket. Most weeks, it wouldn't even drop. When it did, you'd have to beat a good twelve or thirteen people in a roll for it.

The Illustration was so valuable (1) because it was a darn good trinket with gobs of spell power, and (2) it seemed impossible get it -- or any good trinket, for that matter. You can still head to Dalaran and buy trinkets with emblems, like the Talisman of Resurgence, but their use is painfully specialized and their value is often less than trinkets you can find in lower level heroics.

It turns out that good trinkets are hard to find for a reason: Blizzard like it that way. Bornakk at the official World of Warcraft forums wrote today:

"Trinkets are really the one item (weapons are to a lesser extent) that we use to try and capture that old slot machine feel from the classic Molten Core days. Yes, completely random loot with huge loot tables can be frustrating but we are pretty far from being completely random these days. Trinkets however are still somewhat random, they can be hard to acquire, and there is often a lot of competition for them."

Here's a neat tip from Amiyuy of the WoW Ladies Livejournal group. Personally, I don't mind the "fog" effect that sometimes pops up in game -- I experienced it most recently while doing OS the other day, though it pops up on the haunted Borean Tundra coast and a few other places ingame as well. But a few people don't get along with it too well; like the drunken blur effect, it can be somewhat overwhelming for those with a weak stomach.

Fortunately, there's a way to turn both of those off -- you just have to dive into the config.wtf file in your World of Warcraft installation's WTF folder (open it up with Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac, though be careful in there, and save a copy before you do it: if you accidentally edit anything else, it could cause problems on your game), add SET ffx "0" to the end of the file, save and close it, and then you shouldn't see that fog effect any more.

I like this post over at Tank Like a Girl that raises the question of just when your guild should make the big step to move on up the raiding ranks. Just last night, my very casual guild headed into Ulduar for the first time, and even though we'd never been in there before (we've been doing Naxx, OS, and EoE with some regularity, though when I say we're casual, I mean we're really casual), I think we did it at exactly the right time. We made it up to Kologarn -- enough to know that we didn't go in too early (and come out empty-handed, unable to down any bosses) or too late (and breeze through the place).

Now obviously, every guild is in a different place raiding-wise (and most guilds are way ahead of ours, I know), and TLaG is dealing with a different dilemma: whether to take down Yogg-Saron before moving on to ToC or not. And in her case, she's got the added "gotta catch 'em all" thinking. But it's a tough thing as a raid leader -- you don't want to move on past content you know you can do eventually, and progression always beckons. In the end, you've got to figure out what's best for the guild. And of course, the content's not going anywhere -- if you can't drop a certain boss this week, there's always the next raid reset.

I've been killing Sarth for months and, oddly I still enjoy it. Sans the last half an hour which normally involves bickering and the following question: 'What's a raid roll?' repeated ad infinitum. However each time I enter the Chamber of Aspects, I find my eyes drawn to the other still-sealed portals and wonder when they will open. It's clear the Dragonflight portion of Wrath lore is still incomplete and I live in hope these new raids might be tied into patch 3.3 or even the new expansion.

So tell me readers, when do you think Blizzard will start opening the other Sanctums? What kind of raids would you like to see for each flight? Do you think it might tie into the whole Infinite Dragonflight questline or be something to do with the Lich King? What are your thoughts, constant readers?

A few quick notes this week: we are no longer posting about Vault of Archavon ninjas because a) there's just too many of them, and b) they often have nothing to do with guilds, and this column is about guild drama, not PuGs. Also, we are way, way backlogged on guild recruitment -- apparently everybody and their guild is recruiting new players. We'll spotlight guilds as we can, but we've got way more coming in than we can post for now. Sorry if your guild got missed, hopefully you'll find the people you need. This week's GW is right after the break.

We finally did it. Heroic: The Twilight Zone. I thought we'd get it much sooner than yesterday -- and we had come close a couple of times -- but thanks to shoddy third world Internet, things often don't go the way we plan them. Several key raid members would get disconnected mid-battle, and we were never quite sure what caused it. We'd just blame it on a bad connection and hope for the best. So imagine the great luck we had when we finally got it all together.

That was an awesome night, and we headed to Naxxramas to clean up and ended up making quick werk of Patchwerk without even trying. I guess when you hit your stride, things just fall into place. Have you ever had a really good run where everything just worked out? A good day of playing where things just go your way? Gunning for Battlegrounds Achievements, I've had bad days but also excellent days where I felt like I just couldn't be beat.

What things have worked out for you? Selling stuff at the Auction House as soon as you put them out? Successful Heroic dungeon farming? Mike asked the other day if the RNG worked out really well for some of you, but what about stuff that isn't so random? When you're right on top of your game? I wish all my Arena sessions were like that, but well, nothing's perfect. How about you? Have you hit your WoW stride lately? Tell us how good things have been going in-game so far.

We don't really know how or why you would make an intro movie for a raiding guild, but there you go. That's the intro for Goon of Kil'jaeden, who are apparently currently working on Sarth 3D. I like the music, although as a trailer, it doesn't really work that well. Exactly what is coming soon?

Looking for your fix of guild drama, downed and recruiting news for the week? It's right here in GW. If you've got a tip about any guild from around the realms, feel free to send it in to us at wowguildwatch@gmail.com (we've got tons of tips coming in lately, so if you don't see your guild here this week, it'll probably be in next week). Click the link below to read on.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

Arriving with the upcoming 3.1 patch, Ulduar will be ground zero for hard mode raiding -- complex encounters rewarding the best loot in the game, presumably a hardcore raider's dream. There's only one problem: Hard mode is hard. Some people don't like hard. They like easy. Easy bosses, easy loot, and everybody wins, right? But other players enjoy a challenge. This week, one reader wonders how he can get his guild to dance the hard-mode mambo with Ulduar's finest.

Hey Scott,

With the release of Ulduar on the minds of most players, I thought this might be a timely question that ties in a current issue our guild's been having with what I see becoming a serious problem for us in the new 3.1 instance.

The current problem:

After clearing all available 25-man content and having it on farm for over a month, a line seems to have been drawn in the proverbial sand. Half of our raiders consider multiple drake Obsidian Sanctum the next step in guild progression. However, the other half seem to be content farming the content that is "easy" for us and are happy not logging on when we schedule attempts.

Furthermore, whenever we do get enough people for a "progression" raid, we run into the same problem. After a few attempts (I have seen as few as 2), we inevitably get the one or two raiders planting the seed of doubt.

"We don't have the DPS for this."

"Our healing is weak."

Badges of Justice, Battleground marks, Marks of Honor Hold and Thrallmar, Spirit Shards, Stone Keeper's Shards, Emblems of Valor, Emblems of Heroism, and now Emblems of Conquest: Ulduar will add yet another currency item into the game and Cypruss of Draka wonders, rightfully, if it's all just too much. The good news is that since the currency system was introduced, all of this stuff is out of our bags, but wouldn't it just be easier if instead of creating a whole new token system, Blizzard just charged a lot more for the gear?

Bornakk says no -- he says that if they just kept the same tokens and charged more per item, people would end up doing Naxx, Ulduar, OS, and any other instances that dropped that token every single week rather than actually moving up through the content, which is what Blizzard wants us to do. He also says that the Emblem exchange mechanic is designed to help this -- you can do Ulduar and go backwards for the gear, but you can't do Naxx ten extra times to get Ulduar gear.

Which, we have to give it to Blizzard, is actually pretty smart. Yes, it does keep players from farming up the tokens (Blizzard knows that if you could run all the instances per week just to get one kind of token, there'd be lots of players who would), but it also keeps people progressing to get gear they can upgrade to. As Bornakk says, they've been trying to improve the Badge system ever since it was introduced in BC, and this method of introducing new currency to send players up the ladder is a result of their work there.

Spartonian over on WoW LJ has been running some old content, and he points out something that everyone should hear: now is the absolute best time to be running the old Burning Crusade endgame. He says the contest is laughably easy with current endgame levels and gear, and yet, because we're still basically at the beginning of this expansion's endgame, there are still quite a few items that can be picked off of the end bosses in Black Temple and Sunwell (not to mention you can pick up the achievements for those places if you weren't able to down them before.

And he's right -- there are some nice trinkets still found in those old instances, and who wouldn't want to complete their Warglaive set or grab a Thori'dal from Sunwell? Sure, the stats may not be the best, but until the ammo changes go in, you can save money while soloing -- and own a legendary to boot.

Of course, when Ulduar shows up, we'll all likely be too busy with the new content (be it the raids or the Argent Tournment or whatever else you got) to go back to Burning Crusade. But now, during the downtime post-OS and Naxx, is the perfect time to go back and clean up the old content.