Posts with tag ruby

Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration will show you how, brought to you by Joe Perez, otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and the For The Lore podcast.

Last week we talked a bit about some addons that you may have found useful as a restoration shaman. Sadly though, shortly after that post, news broke that AVR/AVRE would be going away in patch 3.3.5. The addon did some things that Blizzard was just not too happy about. The week was not filled with all bad news, though. We have had some amazing Cataclysm screenshots every day, Rich Maloy had an awesome post on enhancement weapons and the loot tables for Ruby Sanctum 25-man and 10-man have been slightly updated.

There are still no heroic mode items yet, but there seems to be a fair amount of loot shaping up for restoration shaman in the normal mode alone. Keep in mind that this is still on the PTR and subject to change, but let us take a peek at what sort of itemization we can look forward to in the next content patch.

Today's announcement of the upcoming Ruby Sanctum raid, coming with Patch 3.3.5, was well-met, though it raised a number of questions as to the nature of the instance -- how will it work, what kind of loot can we expect, etc. Zarhym popped back into the original thread a few times to give clarification on a few points:

• While the instance has a similar layout to the Obsidian Sanctum philosophically, the three sub-bosses (Saviana Ragefire, Baltharus the Warborn, and General Zarithrian) will each be own encounter all their own. The "drakes-up" functionality of Sartharion will not carry over into the Halion encounter.
• Heroic difficulty is likely to be toggled in the same way that heroic difficulties are handled in ICC (a UI toggle).
• Saviana, Baltharus, and Zarithrian will each drop an Emblem of Frost, but probably not special loot.
• Expect loot in the instance to be "about the same item level" as the Lich King items on their respective difficulties.
• The loot from Halion will be offset pieces as well as trinkets and other items "of that nature." So, basically, Sartharion loot.
• The instance is intended to be a prelude to Cataclysm and should provide some advancement for the new expansion's storyline before the 4.0 patch, drawing on Deathwing's desire to weaken the Wyrmrest Accord prior to his emergence from Deepholm.
• Arthas is still considered the final boss of the expansion -- this is merely a complementary raid, like Onyxia with ToC, with ties to Cataclysm.

Sounds like about what we were expecting. Keep an eye on WoW.com for more information on the Ruby Sanctum as it comes in, likely starting with the upcoming PTR.

This is an interesting little system -- unfortunately, it's probably a little too complicated for most people to use, but the functionality is intriguing. WoWHorn is an open source application that basically monitors your achievements on the Armory, and will Twitter about it when you earn a new one. To get it up and running, you'll need the application itself of course, and you'll probably also need Ruby installed if you don't have it yet (OS X has it already, I believe, and Linux may as well). I don't think you'll need to input your actual WoW password (the program should be able to look up your info with just your character name and realm), but you will have to punch in your Twitter credentials if you want it to tweet for you. Once you've got everything working (and you'll have to ignore the errors, I got quite a few), you should see a tweet pop up in your feed whenever you get new points ingame.

If you're a programmer type, you can read about the making of the app, and though, as I said, the app is probably a little too hacky for widespread use (it's not quite ready for primetime yet, and do you really want to run a separate application just to twitter about your achievements for you?), the functionality is the thing here. It would be cool for Blizzard to have the Armory interact officially with other networks on the Internet, either Twittering about your character or sending your profile out to Facebook.

Not that anything like that should distract them from future content, of course. But if they want free advertising, allowing their subscribers to more easily share and disseminate information about their characters won't hurt.