In my humble opinion the refreshment table is pretty neat idea. A Mage spend two Arcane Powders and starts casting the ritual, then two others join in.Viola!A buffet of yummy, health-and-mana-regenerating, Manna Biscuit goodness appears before your raid. The table sticks around for five minutes or however long it takes to deplete its fifty stacks of food. This is probably one of Blizzard's best additions.
In it's own way, the Ritual of Refreshment is also kind of a curse for Mages.True- the reagents cost a total seventeen silver at the vendor, that's not hard to swallow.Keylogger of Stormscale is annoyed by requests for tables.She pointed out that anyone with a friendly level of reputation with the Shattered Sun Offensive can purchase Naaru Rations, no badgering required.Other posters agreed that it's not the process of casting that's at issue, but the sense of entitlement from other folks about a table.
It's June 9th, and it's the time of the month for the Darkmoon Faire set up camp again. This time, they're stationed in Elwynn Forest, just outside of Goldshire. If you're looking for stuff to do at the Faire, or have never figured out just what it's all about, you're in luck. You can check out WoW Insider for all you need to know about getting the most out of the Faire.
The Faire will be here until June 15th, after which time it will disappear again until July 7th, when it will return to Mulgore. Be sure to head over to Goldshire before then, and we'll see you at the Faire!
This cupcake is sure to resonate with anyone (Alliance, sorry Horde) who has done the Planting the Heart quest in Teldrassil.
The Cleansed Timberling Heart you receive as a reward allows you to summon an ally for 20 minutes, but don't expect this tasty treat to last that long. Here is what you will need:
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week John Patricelli, the Big Bear Butt Blogger, brings you some choice tidbits of knowledge on level 70 consumables for the beary furry crowd.
We've talked about the gear you can get to build your tanking set up to Karazhan, but to actually tank in a raid, you need to bring along plenty of tasty consumables to buff you up to tip-top shape. And that's what we're going to cover today.
There are four basic types of consumables you can have active buffs from.
You can have active at one time;
Flask or Elixir buffs (One Flask, or One Guardian and One Battle Elixir effect)
Multiple scroll buffs (as long as the buffs do not overlap with player spell casting)
One Weapon buff
One food buff
Also, there are tons of potions and items that can be darn handy to use in the middle of a fight, especially when things are looking their bleakest, and with the changes to how Druids shift forms in Patch 2.3, there are some very simple macros that you can use to make your own 'oh no!' buttons. Use at your own risk!
What will help you in your fight is situational, but knowing what you have to choose from can make creating your own shopping list a lot easier.
Greetings fellow travelers of time and space! Welcome to the first official posting of Barrens Chat, a soon to be weekly implement of random craziness. Although I know I'm not the first comic strip, and likely I wont be the last to grace these glorious virtual pages, I invite you to take a romp with me, Megan, as I drag forth those silly comments people make that they hope no one noticed, and glorify them with fancy colors, and ever-changing art.
I will point out that although all of this is will all be incredibly funny to everyone who reads it, including me; it may end up being a "you had to be there" moment. In that case, come back next week! I'm sure it'll be funnier then. No really, it will.
I'm a rather avid raider, putting in a solid 20 hours a week on my Warrior. One of the major things about the time spent raiding is that it can be very precious. There is only so much time that 24 other people, plus appropriate class substitutions, can be available each week. It's critical that the time spent raiding is used well.
Unfortunately, using raiding time well is about as much of a challenge as is downing Illidan. In preparation for this article, I've spent the past three weeks keeping track of the down time in raids. We raid Sunday through Thursday nights, from 7:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. We experience a downtime of about 51 minutes for each raid, which is about 20% of the time. Down time is defined as the time that my character is standing still, not attacking, not moving, and not being MDed to.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not really sure.
Tip #1: Chain pulling
Personally, I do my best at the main tank to chain pull and push the trash through as fast as possible. This works out 99% of the time, however the 1% of the time it doesn't work out can grind the raid to a halt. Case and point: The trash to Supremus isn't too bad, and is a lot of packs where the MT, OT, and Pally tank each have some mobs to tank. There are also some ranged dragons that the Warlocks tank. These pulls can go very fast, and are very predictable. Pulling slowly we can do this in about 40 minutes, while chain pulling each group, we can push through in 15.
Tip #2: Fully self buffed, all the time
It doesn't take much to buff yourself. Every class has some buff they can apply to themselves, be it food buffs, spell buffs, or shouts. The key here is that you can find a minute or two to always buff at least yourself, if not others. Although, it might not always be possible to buff others as you're going along - and that's okay with most raid leaders for trash pulls.
Every Thursday, Well Fed Buff will be serving up the tastiest dishes to boost your HP and stats, just in time for your weekend gaming.
In honor of the impending Spring season, and the traveling Darkmoon Faire, this week's Well Fed Buff will feature an improved version of [Fizzy Faire Drink "Classic"]. Don't worry, we won't be going anywhere near 'New Fizzy Faire Drinks'.
The Improved Fizzy Faire Drinks can be prepared in a variety of styles and flavors, with fun colors and yummy garnishes. As such, several different combinations will be featured, and their mysterious buffs revealed.
In fact, I wanted to create a purple and green float as a symbol of the Darkmoon Faire, but all my local grocery store offered would have made a grape-mint combination. If any brave souls try this, or can snag lime instead of mint, send us a screenshot!
If you're curious, and itching to start off the ice cream season a little early, hop on through the break.
Every Thursday, Well Fed Buff will be serving up the tastiest dishes to boost your HP and stats, just in time for your weekend gaming. Hello hungry readers!Welcome to this week's installment of Well Fed Buff.When the weather gets cold nothing hits the spot like Dragonbreath Chili.This recipe can be acquired from vendors in Dustwallow Marsh or Desolace and requires 200 skill in Cooking to create.For ten minutes after eating, the consumer occasionally belches a cone of flame.The effects of the real version are much longer lasting, but just as deadly.
Patience is the key to the perfect pot of Dragonbreath Chili.Well Sriracha is actually the key, but patience comes in handy.Be prepared to wait at least three hours for this recipe to come to fruition, and keep in mind that it is even better the next day.These instructions makes enough chili to feed a horde of Horde (or Alliance). and are guaranteed to warm you from the outside in... and then some.
In certain ways, playing a hunter is about depletion. You have to worry about running out of ammo, running out of mana (although not as much since Aspect of the Viper was introduced), running out of range to fire your weapon (though thankfully there's no longer a dead zone), and of course you have to worry about your pet running out of happiness. Which means we have to carry around stacks of food in our bag space, which let's not forget is one bag smaller because every hunter needs an ammo bag, and often some extra ammo on top of that. For some reason, I've never thought about this before: why do we need happiness at all?
Sure, it's a nice mechanic at first, adds flavor to the class, but I really like this suggestion by Killernuts (*cough*) of Arthas-H: remove happiness once your pet reaches the top loyalty level. After a while it just becomes a pain; at best I click an AddOn button every once in a while when the alert pops up, and at worst I have to take a break from what I'm doing to scrounge up some food. Or instead of removing it based on pet level, how about based on player level? Make a trainable skill at, say, 30 that keeps pets happy. You can use food to boost their happiness faster (useful with a newly-trained pet), but you don't have to.
At least one nice change is already slated for the pet feeding department: pets will be able to be fed in combat "at some point in a future patch" (Nethaera). So I guess that's nice, since indeed it does suck to lose what can be a significant portion of your damage just because you haven't been obsessively monitoring that little smiley face. Prior to 2.3 it was possible to feign death and then feed one's pet, but this has been "fixed".
Mania's got another good tip for Hunters (man, she's just got tons, doesn't she?). This one's specifically about the Harvest Festival, which went live with patch 2.2 today, and lasts through the week.. The best part of Harvest Festival is, of course, the free food, and so Mania reminds you that Harvest Boar, Harvest Fruit, and Harvest Fish are free, most pets will eat at least one of them, and they're sitting around tables all over Azeroth for you to pick up right now. They stack unique only up to 20 each, apparently, but free food is free food, and considering all the stuff Hunters have to pay for, you Hunters probably want to make at least one stop to grab chow sometime this week.
And while we're talking about Harvest food, I'll remind you about Bounty of the Harvest, a "hidden" quest reward from the Harvest Festival. Blizzard's page only lists the two books as the rewards of the Hero Tribute quests (outside Ironforge and Ogrimmar, for Alliance and Horde), but after finishing those quests, you'll get another reward in the mail-- a horn that conjures four Harvest bread every 12 hours, even after the festival is over. The food grats 2% healing per second while eating, so if you're a Warrior who needs to eat, or a Hunter who has a pet who can eat bread, it's good stuff.
Supposedly the Bread even used to stack with other food, but I just tried it in game, and I had no such luck-- I only had one food buff, and it was the last thing I ate (either the 2% or whatever the other food was). Still, being able to conjure 4 bread in a pinch is always a plus. Harvest food for everyone!
I wasn't going to write about this "so soon" after discussing Trackmenu, but after The Blog King presented appetizer and entree courses on hunter management, I thought this add-on would make the perfect dessert helping. The cheesecake, if you will. (Cherry cheesecake, of course.)
Our friend Gazmik Fizzwidget is a goblin of many talents, and unlike most goblins, his inventions do not tend to blow up. As I said, I spoke about Trackmenu not too long ago, but he has also created an excellent add-on to aid in the sometimes arduous task of keeping your pet fed. Keeping your pet fed is important because, after all, if it's happiness drops too low for an extended period of time, the pet will desert you. Hunters who have invested an extended amount of time and money into their pets will tell you that losing your pet is a bad thing. Re-training from scratch is not a pleasant experience, especially if you acquired a rare pet at a low level that you're particularly fond of.
So what exactly are you to do to keep your pet happy? With the default user interface, you are forced to continually monitor that tiny little tri-colour box beside your pet's unit frame (that I swear looks like a coffee cup) and click the feed icon, and then click the food. It's time consuming, repetitive, and tedious.
Our friend Gazmik has written another gem called Feed-O-Matic that makes feeding your pet so gleefully simple it's the next best thing to total automation! Installation is simple and typical of most add-ons. Probably the most difficult thing is choosing a key to bind to the pet feeding process in the Feed-O-Matic configuration window. Once you have defined your key, Feed-O-Matic will intelligently monitor the contents of your inventory and only feed your pet the food that your pet likes, each time you press the feeding key. It will choose foods in the order of your pet's preference. So if one food will give a higher happiness yield, it will use that up first before moving to the next type. It will also optionally ignore food items that are cooking or quest items. It can also be set to consume "shorter" stacks first to maximize your bag space, although this is less of an issue since the recent changes to the stacking mechanism. Lastly, (and this is perhaps my favourite feature) it can even be set to make your pet growl audibly when it's hungry so you don't have to watch the happiness monitor at all!
I don't know Gazmik personally, and I wouldn't normally review two add-ons from the same person in such rapid succession, but it just seemed like a perfect topical flow today. Remember: He's got what you need!
Petopia has posted a nice guide to feeding your Hunter pet, from the basics all the way up to the math behind each pet feeding tick. If you've ever played a Hunter, you already know that when your pet gets unhappy, you need to feed it, but did you know that the difference between your pet and the food's level affects just how happy the food makes it?
The guide also has some interesting info about "raw fish" and "raw meat," two food categories recently added to the game. At this point, apparently raw fish and meat are interchangeable with their cooked counterparts, but in the future, Blizzard may create pets that only eat raw food, or that are only interested in eating cooked food.
Anyway, if you've played a Hunter all the way to 70, most of this will be very familiar to you (even if you only knew that an unhappy pet wanted food). But as a very general overview of pet feeding tips and resources, it's a good one.
Mania's Arcania has been doing some experimenting with tamed pets on the PTR, and she's got a few great tips for all you hunters picking up new pets. First and foremost, apparently any pet you tame, no matter how happy it is or how often its fed, will stick around with you for at least 30 minutes, so if you tame a new pet and don't have food for it, you've got that long to find some. Dismissing a pet or having it die actually stops that timer, too, so if you don't have food and the time is about to run out, you can dismiss the pet, and then recall it when you have food to feed it.
She's also looked at some more technical information on how quickly pet health returns after various kinds of dismissals-- in most cases, it looks like your pet actually comes back with a lower percentage of health, which then ticks back up to full in just a second. Probably won't affect most Hunters, although a few of the situation she goes through sound like battleground PvP to me, and it could be that Hunters there are using their pets so quickly that it might make a difference. More testing is on the way, she says.
But at least the taming schedule will probably help Hunters who end up grabbing a rare spawn as a pet and then realize they don't have the food to feed them. We've got more breathing room than we knew we had.
As mentioned in yesterday's Rogue post, I highly believe in Cooking as a skill that's excellent to have. You save yourself money in regards to buying food, and you have a highly portable and common source of buffs. For those of us who have classes that can't cast buffs, this is a real boon -- although every class can benefit from added buffs! So when I saw the mentioned addition of more new Cooking recipes in the patch, I had to get out there and see what was available.
For those of you who haven't gotten time to check into them, here's the lowdown. There are three new recipes available from the lovely dancing barmaid, Kylene, in the bar in the Lower City. The amusing thing about these three new recipes (at least to me) is that they have you cooking the off-hand fish "weapons" that you can catch. (Of course, this means that gone are the days of Monty PythonFish Slapping Dance renditions. Wait... Maybe that's just my guild. )
Nonetheless, for those with an eye for fresh fish and sampling the finest in Azerothian Cuisine, check out the Good Eats after the jump!
Well here we go again. Reuters is reporting that a Chinese gamer has died after a "marathon," weeklong gaming session. The 26-year-old apparently collapsed on Saturday after he spent the entire week before (he'd been on break because of the Lunar New Year's celebration) playing an unidentified online game. A local teacher says the reason he played games for a full week was that because of the holiday, "there are only two options. TV or computer. What else can I do in the holiday as all markets, KTV and cafeterias are shut down?"
Be prepared, I guess, to hear about this in all future media examinations of whether or not WoW is addictive. I won't argue that this isn't a sad thing to hear-- no matter what the real cause of this poor guy's death, there were serious problems there that should have been fixed a long time ago.
But I will note that the article mentions the 26-year-old weighed 330 lbs. Why doesn't the headline say "Food addict dies"? Also of note, the last line of the article says that China considers 13% of its Internet users under 18 addicted. WoW, according to "experts," is supposed to be 40% addicts, but neither figure, as far as I can see, actually says what they define as "addicts"-- are they setting the bar for "addiction" low or high?
In my humble opinion the refreshment table is pretty neat idea. A Mage spend two Arcane Powders and starts casting the ritual, then two others join in. Viola! A buffet of yummy, health-and-mana-regenerating, Manna Biscuit goodness appears before your raid. The table sticks around for five minutes or however long it takes to deplete its fifty stacks of food. This is probably one of Blizzard's best additions. 
I'm a rather avid 
In certain ways, playing a hunter is about depletion. You have to worry about running out of ammo, running out of mana (although not as much since Aspect of the Viper was introduced), running out of range to fire your weapon (though thankfully there's no longer a dead zone), and of course you have to worry about your pet running out of happiness. Which means we have to carry around stacks of food in our bag space, which let's not forget is one bag smaller because every hunter needs an ammo bag, and often some extra ammo on top of that. For some reason, I've never thought about this before: why do we need happiness at all?
Mania's 
I wasn't going to write about this "so soon" after discussing 
Petopia has posted 
Mania's Arcania has been 
As mentioned in 
Well here we go again. Reuters is reporting that 
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