Posts with tag patch-4.3

Back in patch 4.3, a feature was implemented that automatically offered guild leadership to another guildie if the GM didn't log in for 30 days. A few unscrupulous GMs have taken to logging in just before the 30 days are up in order to keep control, and then they disappear for another month. In April, Blizzard hotfixed the feature to extend the inactive time to 90 days before the GM spot would be offered to another guild member. Thus, evil GMs now have even more time in between needed logins. Are these players just allowing their guilds to be leveled up by others in order to turn around and sell them? Possibly.

Of course, the automatic changing of leadership has its benefits as well. GMs may vanish for extremely good reasons, and this feature allows guilds to move on. Guildies are also protected from GMs who quit WoW without saying goodbye -- inconsiderate, but not evil.

I made the stupid mistake of parking guild leadership on a barely used alt once. I don't remember my reasoning. Seriously, why would I do that? So guild leadership got offered up, even though my main character kept logging in.

Is your GM taking advantage of the timing in a way that is detrimental to your guild? Or have you been in a guild where the leadership has been automatically taken from an absent GM? What were the results?

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I don't usually run damage meters. I had one for a long time when I wrote about cats and moonkin for Shifting Perspectives, but after going full-time to bears and trees, I uninstalled mine and never looked back. Most of the time I just didn't want to know how much damage or healing someone in a group or raid was doing, and particularly for PUGs, it felt like overkill. As my guildies always posted the night's raid data to World of Logs, I didn't want the distraction of trying to own the meters as a healer, and I sure didn't need the extra lag that having Recount running on my system always seemed to cause.

I reinstalled Recount after the Vengeance changes in patch 4.3 because I was curious about how much damage it was adding to 5-man tanking (answer: a lot), and then again to see the damage differential between PvE and high-end PvP gear. Afterwards, I just never got around to uninstalling it. If I'm more than 50% of the group's damage as a tank, it's generally best not to stress groups by asking if they want damage-dependent achievements, and a few pulls into Zul'Aman, I'll have a good idea of whether aggressive pulling for a bear run is likely to pay off. Spamming the meters doesn't help anyone, but if you're just using it to inform rather than dictate the play experience, then I'll admit it has its uses.

Do you use damage meters? Why? And what's the best use -- and the worst abuse -- of them that you've seen?

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Technically, as I write this, the Dragon Soul isn't actually dead yet, nor do raids really die so much as either become outdated or revamped. (Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman stand as examples of raid content that died to be reused, while Naxxramas was used again as an introductory raid.) But since we're closing in on our fourth month running the raid instance, I thought this was a good time to examine it critically. What were the Dragon Soul's main themes? How did it function both as a raid instance and as a platform to end Deathwing's story arc? And most importantly to me, did I enjoy the ride?

Dragon Soul as an experience was fascinatingly diverse compared to previous raids. It eschewed the static finding of some dark cave or towering fortress to instead create a raid wherein we traveled the world, with different environments for the bosses to suit the locations and set pieces for our transitions. One complaint I've seen is that by reusing the Dragonblight and Wyrmrest Temple, Blizzard's design team was cutting corners -- but frankly, I don't find that criticism very accurate. First off, Wyrmrest is where the dragonflights typically meet, as demonstrated by Malygos' assault during the Nexus War, so it makes perfect sense for it to be where Deathwing sends his full Twilight's Hammer forces to try and crush them.

• Healers coming back via Scroll of Resurrection will no longer find strength on their starter sets.
• In Madness of Deathwing, Burning Blood will no longer prematurely spike to 100 stacks if you happen to damage the Arm and Wing Tentacles quickly.

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

Hey, get the Blu-ray transfer of this movie; the visual quality is great. Plus you'll own two of the finest movies ever made if you buy the Aliens Blu-ray too. If you have to pick one, though, get Aliens instead.

TheBishop asked:

With the change to achievements in MoP, specifically sharing mounts and pets towards collection numbers and them being useable by all toons, do you believe my warrior would be able to use and count my pally specific mounts? Or do you think certain mounts like the pally and lock ones may be class use specific?

The mounts that will be shared between characters on your accounts are specifically ones that are granted by achievements, according to what Blizzard reps have stated. It's unlikely that your shaman will be able to use your dreadsteed mount or your warrior your charger, since those are granted by a class trainer, not an achievement.

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

I follow a lot of people on Twitter, but one of my favorites is @beebee880, probably the nicest guy on the internet and a big fan of buses in general. My friend Satellite High made a split EP with Bert Smith that's all about Beebee's bus-related obsessions and it's pretty rad. You should go get it.

Puntable asked:

Why do you think they made the raid hit cap for casters more than twice as much as it is for melee?

Easy answer! Melee classes also have to deal with expertise, so it balances out in the end.

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

I know Adam just used this image yesterday, but man, how could I resist? Image relevant to next question.

Finneous asked:

I wonder, if you create a character in the MOP beta, and later buy the game, will the character still be there to play, or do you have to start from scratch?

You don't get to keep your characters from any Blizzard beta (or many online game betas, period). Expect that trend to continue with MoP when the beta ends.

Starting at server maintenance next Tuesday, the Power of the Aspects buff will increase in Dragon Soul. This means that the health and damage output from enemies will be reduced by 10%. Remember that this only applies to normal and heroic versions and that it can always be shut off.

The Power of the Aspects buff currently stands at 5%, which went into effect on Jan. 31, 2011. So it took about a month for the buff to increase to the next level. Blizzard has said the spell will continue to increase but not at a set interval, as was done in Icecrown Citadel.

The full blue post is as follows:

Blizzard Entertainment

During the scheduled server maintenance on the week of February 28, the "Power of the Aspects" spell will grow more powerful, reducing the health and damage dealt of all enemies in the Dragon Soul raid by 10%. This spell will grow progressively stronger over time to reduce the difficulty and make the encounters more accessible. The spell will affect both normal and Heroic difficulties, but it will not affect the Raid Finder difficulty.

Don't need the help of the Dragon Aspects? The spell can be disabled by talking to Lord Afrasastrasz at the beginning of Dragon Soul.

We hope you continue to enjoy Dragon Soul, and that these changes encourage you to attempt a higher difficulty, or just keep pushing to down that next boss.

source

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Cross-realm RealID raiding has taken World of Warcraft by storm ever since the ability to enter old raids with RealID friends was introduced in patch 4.3.2. Fearing the end of server communities and the collapse of civilization, players were instead greeted with a quickly mobilizing mass of players on Twitter, Reddit, and other social media to form cross-server communities for raiding. Without server boundaries, these groups can recruit from a larger pool and have more time flexibility. BattleTags will make this all easier.

Over the last few weeks, many cross-realm raiding websites and resources have popped up. If you're looking to get into a cross-realm raid, here's a handy list of many places out there that are putting together old raids without the hindrance of those pesky servers.

• Twitterland Raiding http://twitterlandraiding.com/
• LFRaid.com www.lfraid.com
• Cross Raid www.cross-raid.com
• OpenRaid US http://www.openraid.us/
• OpenRaid EU http://www.openraid.eu/

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mathew McCurley (@gomatgo) will be your host today.

After complaining about archaeology never paying off and being a dumb, boring grind, I randomed three new rares, bringing me up to 19 out of 20 rares for my Professor title. Talk about a lucky change of fortune. This is where the trendy people would put something like #humblebrag, but we only put that in our tags.

Nobar asked:

Any idea if Blizzard ever will implement a native linux client? I know that we have workarounds but i'd prefer a native one.

It is unlikely that World of Warcraft will get a native Linux client release. The numbers are just not there, most likely, and the development time for such a project could potentially be astronomic. Commenter JKWood made the point that the new 64-bit WoW client works very well with Wine 1.4-rc4 for Linux in a WoW64 setup, so that sounds like something you might want to try if your Linux WoW install isn't performing as optimally as you'd like. Maybe we can draw some attention to the subject matter here and get a discussion going in the comments, and you might even want to try the official support forums.

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

The new Sleigh Bells album is almost out! Aaahhh! I've heard the whole thing and, minus this song and one or two others, it's a lot less raucous than I thought it would be, based on Treats. I still like it, though.

Simpsons Rule asked:

I have a question: Has the Daily Quest column been canceled? There hasn't been a post since January 27.

Nope! Not in spirit, anyway. Some of you guys may have noticed slight changes in the format here, and this is one of them. Basically, we're trying to make sure that really cool stuff like interesting community blogs and fan creations doesn't get lost in our daily content cycle. To that end, we're spotlighting things more individually and not under a single banner like The Daily Quest. You'll note we've done this with other columns as well, like our roleplaying column, among others.

There are no pure DPS classes in World of Warcraft that use two-handed melee weapons to deal damage and only one pure DPS class that can even equip them. There are literally hundreds of two-handed melee weapons in this game. This has always annoyed me, because I love big weapons. I know you know this about me.

One of the reasons I hate the argument that pure DPS classes should have dibs on top DPS weapons is that in order for me to play a character that uses a two-hander, I have no choice but to play a hybrid. In fact, in order to play as melee DPSer at all, I either have to play a rogue (all three rogue trees dual wield small, fast weapons) or a hybrid. Those are my options. If I wanted to play ranged DPS, I could pick from one of three possible pure classes, but if I want to melee, I'm forced to either give up the weapons I enjoy and take up a playstyle I don't like or accept that I will be forced to DPS at a penalty and be expected and/or pressured to tank.

This to me is asking me to pay twice, and it's unacceptable. Last week, Ghostcrawler posted an excellent discussion on class and role that I highly recommend everyone check out, and it seriously has me pondering what design I'd prefer for World of Warcraft and indeed how I feel about classes and roles entirely.

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

It's pretty nice of Blizzard to make sure you know that its game will kill you.

Coffee asked:

With the arrival of account-wide achievements, do you think Blizzard will add something where our achievement points have some in game effect? For example, special vendors that will only sell to you if you have greater than 3000 achievement points, another vendor that will sell different items if you have over 5000, etc...

Like I said on the podcast recently, I've learned never to say never about anything Blizzard could possibly do in relation to WoW, but the devs have stated several times that they never intended for achievement points to be a real currency. So, I doubt it, but with account-wide achievements and other systems changes coming with MoP, we'll just have to wait and see.