3.2: The Head Explosion Patch

Okay, let me get a few things here straight.

# Construction of the Crusaders’ Coliseum is complete. Testing not yet available. New raid normal and heroic modes for the Crusaders’ Coliseum can be toggled using the Dungeon Difficulty setting. This applies to 10 and 25 player versions. 10 player (normal), 25 player (normal), 10 player (heroic) and 25 player (heroic) all share separate raid lockout timers.

* Trial of the Champion
o 5 player (normal and heroic mode) dungeon.
o Daily quest added to the heroic daily dungeon quest giver.
* Trial of the Crusader
o 10 and 25 player (normal mode) raid dungeon.
* Trial of the Grand Crusader
o 10 and 25 player (heroic mode) raid dungeon.
o Crusaders’ Tribute: Active on heroic difficulty only, the tribute system will limit players on the number of attempts the raid is allotted each week. Additional rewards can be earned depending on the number of attempts left in the tribute run each week when the final boss is defeated.

Okay, so there’s a 5-man dungeon that can be done on normal or heroic. Then there’s a 10-man raid and 25-man raid. These can also be done on normal or heroic. While a heroic raid used to be the 25-man version of the 10-man normal raid, you can choose to do a 25-man raid on normal mode or 10-man raid on heroic mode.

Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar – both located near the Battlemasters in either city – and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold.

Behsten and Slahtz. Behsten…Slahtz. Best in…slots…

*head explosion*

Apprentice Riding (Skill 75): Can now be learned at level 20 for 4 gold

*head explosion*

# Emblem System Changes

* Both the 10 and 25 player instances of the Crusaders’ Coliseum drop a new Emblem of Triumph.
* Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism.
* The heroic dungeon daily quest will now reward 2 Emblems of Triumph and the normal daily dungeon quest will reward 1 Emblem of Triumph.
* The existing achievements to collect 1, 25, 50, etc. Emblems of Heroism, Valor, and Conquest have been converted to Feats of Strength since Heroism and Valor Emblems are no longer attainable.
* New achievements have been added to collect various amounts of any combination of emblems.

Okay, so we’re now getting Emblems of Conquest from stuff that would normally give Emblems of Heroism and Valor. There will be no way to earn Emblems of Heroism or Valor except from redeeming Emblems of Conquest for them. Many items will still be purchasable via Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as the new epic gems (*mild head explosion*) but they will no longer drop in dungeons or raids and are no longer the reward for doing the heroic daily quest. Instead, there will now be Emblems of Triumph (FOR ME TO POOP..oops, sorry) as a reward for this quest and there currently is no other way to earn Emblems of Triumph that is known at this time and what Emblems of Triumph will be redeemable for is also currently unknown right now and FOR GOD’S SAKE WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY-03vYYAjA

Anyone got a couple aspirin?

The Ulduar Drinking Game

After much thought, I’ve come up with the following drinking game to be used whenever raiding Ulduar.

Whenever someone asks which part of Ulduar to teleport to, take a drink.

That’s all you need in here, really, because you’re going to die from alcohol poisoning.

RIP Naxxramas (11/13/08-4/14/09)

With the release of Patch 3.1 of World of Warcraft, entry level raid Naxxramas passed on into obsolescence Tuesday. It was five months old.

“It had a good run,” Blizzard “blue” poster and game designer Ghostcrawler said late Monday evening as official word of the patch reached the various World of Warcraft news sites and trade chat channels in game. “Five months is an extremely long life span for content these days and our players are clearly ready for something new.”

What was at one time the bleeding edge of endgame content in WoW, Naxxramas was rapidly pwned hardcore by players of all types during its lifespam. First in three days by Ensidia, one of the world’s top guilds, and then more gradually by other guilds around the world, until end boss Kel’Thuzad was being soundly defeated by players that many would consider “noobs.”

“Some claim that Naxxramas was made to be too easy,” Ghostcrawler added. “And that it shouldn’t have taken us five months to come up with more content to replace the old content that was cleared in a month. I say, look at all those epics, man!”

Indeed, during Naxxramas’ lifespam multiple players were able to take multiple Warcraft characters into Naxxramas on both 10 and 25-man raids and gotten their share of phat loot much faster, speeding up the process of no longer needing to go anywhere near the raid once newer content had been released.

Because Naxxramas has been described by much of the player base as “easysauce” and players had five months to kill in between the release of The Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack and the first official patch containing the next level of endgame content, the raid has now joined the category of “nostalgia raiding.” The breakneck pace that a raid went from cutting-edge to nostalgia does not appear to concern Blizzard.

“We expect some Retro Raiding nights to visit Naxxramas to pick up those last couple achievements,” Ghostcrawler continued. “You know, to break up the soon-to-come monotony of Ulduar.”

Naxxramas is survived by that god damned Eye of Eternity on Heroic and Sartharion with three drakes up. Passing on into the realm of the obsolete before Naxxramas were Sunwell Plateau, Black Temple, Mount Hyjal, Tempest Keep, Serpentshrine Cavern, Magtheridon’s Lair and Gruul’s Lair.

Wrong Toon, Dummy!

So there I was on my shaman, waiting for some slacker pugs to get closer to the stone so we could do some summons for Utgarde Keep. Nobody seemed to be in a big hurry to get there so I was going to level some herbalism. All your goldclover are belong to me.

I near a yellow dot on my minimap and suddenly I see a vykrul mob riding around on something. A quick click shows me that it is none other than Vigdis the War Maiden. It’s a rare spawn ZOMG. I’m specced Resto at the moment so I wonder if it’ll be a tough kill like the rare spawns in Burning Crusade. But it’s not. Ding! Northern Exposure! I think at the time that it’s a little silly that my shaman of all toons found one, but hey, what can you do.

A week or two later I’m herbing again in Zul’Drak and draw some aggro and it’s a mob I don’t recognize. Hello there, Griegen! I’ve now killed two mobs on my way to the most insane achievement evar, Frostbitten.

Just the other day, I got to take the mage along to a Naxx 10. Which we’re totally sick of, by the way, but that’s another post. Anyway, two achievements were obtained without even attempting to try. The first was Arachnophobia. We weren’t rushing it, we just calmly and with precision destroyed Faerlina and Maexxna and it didn’t take an hour to hand out two pieces of loot. The second was Make Quick Werk of Him. Patchy went down in style in 2:52.

So for those keeping score at home, that’s an achievement (and two rare mobs) killed on Doffy the Shaman and two achievements earned on Sherm the Mage. Take a moment and guess how many of those Doofy the Paladin has.

If you said none, you win! Please e-mail me for your prize. (Note: prizes void where prohibited. Which is wherever you are reading this.)

On my paladin I’ve done 3,000 quests, gotten exalted with over 20 factions (on the way to 25), spent 1,200 gold on a 22-slot bag, took 10 minutes hitting a level 80 elite barehanded, spent way too much money on mounts and pets and gotten a few other pretty darn ridiculous achievements. But I’ve never seen a rare mob and certain achievements will just elude him forever. Despite being Guy Who Never Dies On Heigan (four months and counting since the last DanceFAIL), I am just not allowed to have The Safety Dance achievement.

What achievements have you gotten on the wrong toons?

March Sadness

The last four days are probably my favorite time of year. It’s the NCAA college basketball tournament, where 64 teams battle in a single elimination tournament to determine that year’s champion. The true highlight is the first round, when 32 games are played in two days. It’s an insane amount of basketball jammed into ~12 hours on Thursday and Friday.

It’s a heck of a lot more exciting than what’s going on in WoW at the moment.

While we wait for Ulduar to get datamined and farmed to hell on the PTR so that it’s a faceroll on day one (and it will be, trust me), Brade Frurry progression has stormed to a halt. Three weeks ago we finally got Sartharion with two drakes down. Two weeks ago we one shot it. We wanted to try three drakes this week and found that 18 people signed up. Two drakes was a disaster with that number but we managed to get one. We’ve got the Dedicated Few achievement in heroic Naxxramas and it’s certainly not because we were shooting for it. That was all we could manage.

We’ve had a couple of unfortunate RL issues that prevented some people from attending raids and that’s fine. But there’s also a rather large “I’m geared up, see ya next patch!” mentality that hit a couple of members. It’s frustrating for those who want to raid that we either have to do less than we planned or, worse, dive into the PuG pool to fill the raid. I was running Friday Night Naxx 10 for alts and the bored and I used to have to kick DPS out. Last week I could only manage 8 signups. I didn’t do it this week and decided to watch basketball instead. It’ll probably return come Ulduar since we’re heading straight into 25s.

Blizzard has seriously dropped the ball on endgame here by providing so few raids to do and also making them too easy. I’ve never seen such massive content burnout before and I’m nearing three years since I started up my first toon (ye gods). We’re not finished with our progression (yet) and some folks have seen it okay to just stop showing up without any notice. They’ll probably be back and ready to rock the day 3.1 goes live which hardly seems fair. Have other guilds dealt with this?

3.1 Changes: Sacred Shield Ner…wait, what?

Oh look, some Holy Paladin nerfs changes were announced. Let’s see what we’ve got today!

Sacred Shield – Cannot be on more than one target at any time.

Wait, what? Sacred Shield could be on more than one target? Since when? Why was I not informed of this? I would actually have used this spell way more often than I do if I had known this to be the case.

Infusion of Light – No longer has a chance to reduce the casting time of Holy Light, but increases the the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead.

No, really: SACRED SHIELD CAN BE CAST ON MORE THAN ONE TARGET? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS AWESOME. I AM GOING TO CAST THIS ON THE WHOLE RAID NEXT TIME AND LET SOMEONE DIE BECAUSE I WON’T BE HEALING THEM, JUST CASTING THIS SPELL. But my Flash of Light crits will be awesome.

Er, I mean, I’m torn. This is clearly a PvP change, which I hate. But it doesn’t completely suck for PvE. I’m not reliant on Holy Shock crits proccing this so my next Holy Light is uber-fast. It’s just kind of a bonus. Now it’s got an extra chance to crit for massive heals and a mana refund. Yay, I suppose.

Tagged! The Screenshot Meme

So I’ve been tagged by a couple of people since I am officially one of the worst bloggers in blogging history. Thank you to Dann and HolyWarrior at The Good, The Bad and the Downright Evil for tagging me.

What you’re supposed to do is check the 6th item in the 6th folder of your screenshots folder. I…don’t have six folders in my screenshot folder so I just went with the 6th image. And behold!

lolswordofdoom

I meant to do an entry on it (fail blogger,remember) but it didn’t happen. Remember that Enti’s Quenched Sword, the gray sword that dropped in Northrend and didn’t have a level requirement on it? The text says it does next to no damage, but hand it to a level one toon and they just slaughtered everything in sight. And when you got Rend, things got even more fun. You could run up to something, Rend it and then go to the next mob because it ticked for well over 100, which was more than enough to kill everything in Elwynn Forest. I leveled Grayitems the warrior to level 10 in about an hour that way. My goal was met when Hogger died. And then the sword received a level requirement so poor Grayitems met the DELETE feature.

I’d post something else from the screenshot folder but it’s a whole bunch of fail, largely accidential key hits (how? I have no idea). I do want to post the screenshot of dinging 62 off of Onyxia, but it’s on my parents’ computer I do believe.

Real content coming, someday.

25 Useless Facts About Doofy!

If you’re on Facebook (which I am. I mean, the guy who writes this, not an actual Facebook page for Doofy. Because that would be weird.), you are probably familiar with the 25 Random Things meme that is working its way around like bird flu. You post a note where you list 25 facts, opinions, thoughts and other random things that can be as in depth or as shallow as you want them to be. In lieu of some actual blogging content, I thought I’d do the same for Doofy. And since I’m required to “tag” people here, I tag everyone reading this. Suckers!

1. We’re nearing three years since I first started WoW. Games rarely stick with me for that long.

2. There will be things on here I’ve mentioned during earlier entries, such as: Doofy was not my first character. That was a troll rogue made on my old roommate’s account. I named him Bojingo. We had been watching a lot of Scrubs on DVD at the time.

3. When I got my own account I rolled another troll rogue and levelled him again. I got him to the 50’s and then rolled Doofy. He’s still in the 50’s.

4. I was in the same guild from the low teens until returning to the game last August when it pretty much collapsed while I was gone. It took quite a bit for me to finally leave the guild even though there was nobody in it.

5. This past weekend was spent getting the Ambassador achievement. I got exalted with Darnassus on Saturday and spent today getting Exodar and Gnomeregan Exiles reputation. I only needed about 15 stacks of Runecloth to finish out the Exodar rep.

6. I’m also about 160 quests away from 3000. This frightens me, actually.

7. Even if I have nothing to do on him and plan on playing an alt, I always log Doofy in first. It’s tradition.

8. I’m a keyboard turner, a clicker and I make very minimal use of macros. I don’t use that focus thing either. How I manage to kill anything or keep people alive is a miracle.

9. Still bitter about that Illumination nerf. Even though I never run out of mana anymore.

10. I hate that you can AoE down all trash in Naxxramas. Even on 25-man. I refuse to cast Blizzard on my mage. And I try to keep my AoE damage to under 10% of my damage total.

11. I admit to being biased against night elf hunters. Which is why I love people like Pike who do what they can to buck the Huntard stereotype. (Oh and hi to Rilgon too.)

12. I lag massively in Dalaran and this computer has 4GB of RAM. I bet it’s because my video card sucks.

13. I dinged 62 off of Onyxia in the first two weeks after The Burning Crusade was released. I have the screenshot somewhere to prove it.

13. I am an UI minimalist. The only thing that really mucks with the default UI is AG Unit Frames so I can make big bars to see exact health and to heal people easier.

14. I play a paladin as a main. I have the ability to heal, tank and DPS. My respec cost is 15g. You have permission to hate me for it.

15. I am a ridiculous packrat. My bank is an absolute disaster right now. But no matter what, I will never part with the 6 pieces of the Tier 0.5 set. I would love to get the tier 0 helm and chest and finish the chain. I idly wonder if it’s doable solo.

16. I enjoy randomly putting Crusader Aura on in groups because it makes people mad.

17. The mage nerfs have filled me with RAAAAAAAAAAAGE. I was finally having fun again on Sherm. And it had surprisingly little with being able to outdamage other mages that outgear me by pretty high margins. Although that was pretty nice.

18. I believe I am the only blogger from Thrall. If anyone out there knows of someone else, let me know.

19. I’ve grown into the Doofy name and kind of accepted it even though I never intended on seriously levelling the character. In my old guild quite frequently and even sometimes in my current guild, people are referred to by their real names. Except me. Frequently heard over vent: “Hey Steve.” “Hey Sarah.” “Hiya Chris.” “Hey Doofy.”

20. Secret: I sometimes raid on my mage while not hit capped. It’s not intentional, honest.

21. I’ve never heard the term “best in slot” so much before Wrath’s release. And I like it, because saying “best in slot” sounds vaguely dirty.

22. I have no desire to level my shaman. He’s 90% to level 75. I had him elemental for a few levels and it went by pretty quick but it was mind-numbingly boring. He’s currently resto and I use him to heal guild alts through the mid-level instances.

23. I hate PVP.

24. I have the 10,000 Honorable Kills achievement.

25. #23 is very likely a result of #24. Since the only way to get properly itemized holy paladin gear before BC was PVP, I did nothing but Alterac Valley in the 3 months between hitting 60 and the release of BC. I probably have less than 100 HK’s since BC’s release.

The Essential Parts of Any Raid: Ventrilo Edition

About a year ago I made an entry on The Essential Parts of Any Raid, showing who you needed to bring in order to have a successful raid. Now, since most raids use a voice chat service such as Ventrilo, it’s time to go through the people you’ll need in your channel to have a full and entertaining evening.

The Loud Talker

Pretty self explanatory. If you’re wearing headphones, prepare to have your ears blown out. If it’s through your speakers, turning the volume on them down prevents you from hearing anyone else. Unfortunately playing too important a role to mute.

The Low Talker

This player either has their microphone about six feet from their mouth, is a quiet person in general or is just too cheap to spring for a new mic. Talks frequently. Wonders in raid chat why they’re being ignored.

The Non-Talker

The player that never talks, ever. Owns a mic. Communicates exclusively in raid/guild chat. One hell of a listener, though and generally a solid player. Talked once and nearly wiped the raid as everyone freaked out.

The Play by Play Guy

Like CNN and The Weather Channel, constantly updating the condition of the raid. The mob health, their health, raid buffs, how much they just crit for, their drink supply, the temperature of their Hot Pockets, etc. For this person, I link them some Ground Gear.

Captain Obvious

“Come on, DPS, step it up!” “Healers, top off those tanks!” “Here come some adds, let’s get a tank on them!” “Rebuff!” /headdesk

The Dude That’s Always Logged In

Inexplicably always logged into Vent even if they’re not logged into the game. May be in a different channel with one or more unknown persons. Causes frequent discussions between guild officers as if the password should be changed.

The DJ

Whenever Push To Talk is hit, a wave of music fills the raid’s ears. For some reason, this player cannot DPS unless something is cranked to 11 in the background. Has never played World of Warcraft with the volume on. Choice of music is either extremely emo or some sort of death metal. Oddly able to be understood over vent when they speak and a good listener.

The Most Important Person In The Entire Raid

A horrible combination of The Play By Play Guy and Captain Obvious. Is also, unfortunately, a Loud Talker. This person will constantly mention over Vent every single thing that happens to them, even if it’s a standard part of the fight and happening to every single member of the raid.

Karazhan example: Maiden of Virtue’s Repentance. “I can’t move! Somebody help me!”
Naxxramas example: Maexena’s Web Wrap. “STUNNED!”

And when they die…”I’M DOWN!!!!!!” as if you might as well wipe since because THEY’RE DOWN!!!! the rest of the fight is meaningless. Will request battle rezzes every time they die. Which is often.

Any others I’m missing?

The Awkward Stage

Despite some attrition thanks to the holidays, Brade Frurry managed to put together two 10-man Naxxramas runs. Kel’Thuzad has now died a few times (the first kill coming on a non-scheduled raid during the holidays), Sartharion is laughably easy (and one group even managed to get him with a drake up) and Malygos adventures begin next weekend.

And now we think we’re ready to give up scheduling 10-man Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum raids and only do them with 25 players. Or are we? This decision was reached tonight after each group cleared Naxxramas this week, the first kill for many. It was further amplified by the fact that half the loot from the first four wings was disenchanted.

We’ve dabbled in heroic raids briefly almost out of boredom, clearing the Spider and Plague quarters without much trouble despite a handful of pugs (which are now no longer necessary). Sartharion was found to be just as easy and even died with 19 people in the raid (achievement, yay!). When we got to Patchwerk, though…yikes. And how do you kill Instructor Razuvious with one shadow priest?

So my question is: When is the time to make the switch into 25-mans full time? As soon as you have the numbers? When you’re sharding things from the 10-mans? When you’ve beaten Naxxramas once? I’d like to see some Emblems of Valor as much as anyone, but I think it’s a bit of a bigger leap than some think.