As usual with WoW patches, patch 2.4.2 includes a couple of wild bugs. My personal favorites(and by favorites I mean I absolutely hate them) are the bugs(changes?) to the Archimonde encounter.
Now, this may just be "Onyxia Deep Breaths moar" syndrome, but the official Dungeons and Raids forum has some pretty substantial(mostly anecdotal) evidence to the contrary. What are these bugs? Well, it seems Archimonde's Doom Fires are spawning on top of the melee and immediately chasing them, rather than travelling out towards the ranged first. Seeing as this fight is generally carried entirely by the melee DPS, that changes the fight quite a bit. The second change/bug is that... your main tank can now be Air Bursted! Hooray! That isn't annoying at all! Sarcasm is sweet!
Archimonde certainly isn't the most difficult encounter in WoW and it is still able to be beaten even now, but I personally hated this encounter with all of my heart and soul to begin with. This doesn't help much. Admittedly, I haven't seen these bugs/changes in action personally yet, but I do not ever want to see them, either. Have I mentioned I hate Archimonde?
So, you know what Haiku is, right? It's form of Japanese poetry. The most popular English version is 3 lines long. The first line is 5 syllables, the second 7, and the third is 5 again. All well and good, I'm sure you say, but what does this have to with WoW? Fimlys of the Asleep at the WoW blog posted a Wow-ku challenge a few days ago, asking people to make up Haikus based on our favorite game.
The dust has settled on most of the servers, and the Fury of the Sunwell has been a success across the board. One of the lingering issues however is attunement. It has been noted before that Onyxia is now the hardest attunement in the game. This has occurred with the removal of the Karazhan, Black Temple, and Mount Hyjal attunements. However this creates a false impression that these instances are no longer worthy of attunements, and thus these quests are no longer worthy of the care and time that's necessary to push forward into them.
You want to get your Vashj and Kael vials, you want to complete your Mount Hyjal attunement, and you want to complete your Black Temple attunement. If you're in a guild that isn't running those instances anymore and is focusing squarely on the Tier 6 content, then you still want to go back and get the attunements.
We all have pieces of gear that we don't want to do away with. For me, it's mainly my Quel'Serrar sword – thousands of gold spent on it pre-bc makes it (adjusted for inflation) the most expensive item I've ever purchased. I'm never going to be getting rid of it.
I know that others have the same sentiments. For instance pictured above is the hat of one of my good friends in game. She's had those moose antlers for about 2 ½ years from Onyxia. I know that she'll never get rid of them, and if she did... well, our guild would probably have to gdisband.
There's something nostalgic about keeping around old gear. It provides a memory of "the good old days" when hitting 60 actually meant something. Those old pieces of gear meant that you had accomplished something epic when epics weren't free. Our old epic pieces of gear are a testament to a time when the game was still new and the wilds of Azeroth were really wild.
This thread over on the forums starts off a little silly (it's a complaint about Kael'thas being both in Tempest Keep and Magisters' Terrace at the same time), but later on gets into some really interesting commentary and thinking about just how the lore and story in this game works. Obviously, there are no problems with having Kael in two places at once (as Bornakk says with an epic burn, a character can be alive on page 1 and dead on page 10 at the same time), but it's interesting that that's not always what happens in the game. Griftah, for example, was never in two places at once, and neither was Hemet Nesingwary -- both of those characters had progressive lore storylines. But Kael, like Thrall, has a storyline that evolves as a character moves forward in their own storyline, and so Blizzard has placed him in two different places at once, and asked players to move their own characters to see the storyline in order.
Interesting stuff. Scuzz makes a particularly interesting point in the thread -- the World of Warcraft really does revolve around player characters, not NPCs. If you discover through quests that Onyxia is actually pretending to be a woman in Stormwind, all of the NPCs your character meets will be shocked. It's a sign of Blizzard's talent at game creation that something can be both known by most players and discovered by one player almost every single day.
Of course there's no problem with Kael being in two places -- I would rather have my character move through a changing world than have Blizzard worry about making sure "reality" was kept correctly. But it's an interesting line being walked very well -- if you do the two instances in order, you get a much better story than if we were simply fighting a generic third boss in Magisters' Terrace.
Drysc reports that a number of realms are under investigation for performance issues and will be undergoing a scheduled maintenance at 5:00 AM PDT on Wednesday, March 12 with a foreseeable downtime of 1 hour (update: Zorayn notes that downtime will be extended to 2 hours as opposed to one). As Drysc edits the thread, realms are added (or removed) regularly. From a quick perusal of the realms, it seems as though it is the Nightfall Battlegroup that is affected. Blizzard currently lists the affected realms as follows:
Aerie Peak Altar of Storms Alterac Mountains Anvilmar Arygos Blackwing Lair Deathwing Demon Soul Doomhammer Gnomeregan Icecrown Jaedenar Kel'Thuzad Lethon Onyxia Sentinels Tanaris The Venture Co Uldaman Undermine
Drysc further notes that other Battlegroups are under close observation and will be taken down for maintenance should any issues arise that might require it.
I don't get it. I'm 70, have lots of nice purples, know the game well enough, and have even done Onyxia dozens upon dozens upon dozens of times back in the pre-BC days. But why then does she inevitably present a problem for me and my friends?
It's probably because she is bugged. And not just bugged, REALLY bugged.
Two groups have now gone in and tried to defeat her. Each time the first attempt was a failure as people relearned not to stand too close to each other (Forsythe run to the center!), run to the side when the rains fire down (<-- 2N, 2N - 1 -->), and all those other small tidbits that make the fight what it is. However when it reached the second attempt, she started acting strange. First, she wouldn't target anyone or let anyone tank her – she just walked around her lair and jerked around a bit. We could still damage her, but that was it. And really it was only the ranged and my crossbow that were able to do any damage (more dots!).
And Blizzard is apparently OK with that. They've been back and forth on attunements since the beginning of the game. On the one hand, attuning a character to an instance like Onyxia makes things feel epic (and indeed, some people think the Alliance version, with the Stormwind reveal, is one of the best quests in the game). But putting attunements in the way just to keep players away from content clearly isn't the way to go about things.
It will be interesting, as always, to see how things change in the next expansion -- Blizzard has already said that they'd like alts to be able to benefit from attunements and reputation rewards, so odds are that while there still will be attunements of some kind, they'll be set up in such a way that once you do them one time, you won't have to do them again. And that's a pretty good balance -- players still get to experience epic content, but it never is forced into a grind where you have to jump through hoops just to get someplace the devs don't want you to be yet.
Bornakk shows up in the thread and says simply that it's a good way to find people to run Karazhan with, implying that Blizzard wants guilds to help each other get attuned, and that in essence, it's not so much a gear check as a group check-- you can't get into Karazhan as a guild unless you've helped each other to get in there first. And I actually like that idea-- if your guild wants your help in Karazhan, they've got to lend a hand first to get you into the instances to get the key fragments. "No guildie left behind," if you will.
I don't have a problem with having an attunement quest to enter the endgame (and you'll probably remember that Onyxia, BWL, and Molten Core attunements are all still in the game). And it seems that Blizzard doesn't either-- they're willing to open up the later endgame as time goes along, but you've still got to get some help to enter it in the first place.
Somehow this episode of The Grind reminds me a lot of my guild's last attempt at Onyxia... (Don't make the same mistake we did: just because you're level 70 doesn't mean she's a pushover!) However, instead of heading out to Dustwallow Marsh and experiencing Onyxia wipes for yourself, you could enjoy the suffering of others vicariously, with the entertaining characters from The Grind. (Though their Halloween Special took top prize for comedy at BlizzCon, episode 1 isn't new. Sadly, we haven't seen anything new from Oblivious Films since summer.)
The use of the term "mud dolls" threw me for a second here, but I think the folks at MMOsite mean clay dolls, as they have posted extremely cute little WoW figurines made out of clay. What fascinates me is that not only are these cute and really stylish, but they really capture each race and class-- the Blood Elf really does look snobby, while the Dwarf looks like he's had an extra ale or two.
Amazing. No word on if they're for sale or not-- MMOsite makes like you can have one on your desk, but the original site is (of course) in Chinese, and so even if they were for sale there, I wouldn't know. Although I did find the hilarious Ony scene above-- if anyone can translate in our comments, please do.
Relmstein has a great tongue-in-cheek guide up about how to "poach" great raiders for your guild. I'm assuming that he doesn't actually suggest you start stealing raiders from other guilds (unless you want to show up in Guildwatch next week), but not only is Relmstein's writeup really funny, but there are a few actual suggestions hidden in there about ways to promote your own growing guild legitimately.
Now, you don't want to start lying about how Eyonix is your GL (#7), or stand outside Karazhan trying to show off (#4), but there's nothing wrong with making sure people know that you're progressing. Have your guildleader post on the forums when you make a big kill, or throw out a few yells when you're about to give out a zone-wide buff (I remember when my guild turned in the Onyxia head way back when, and we did a nice parade through the center of Orgrimmar, all decked out on our mounts). A great video helps, too-- a funny recruitment video will get you attention, but a how-to video for a tough boss your guild has on farm will attract exactly the kind of people you want on your team.
You should never try to steal raiders from other guilds-- guildleaders have a hard enough time keeping a raiding team together as it is without teams fighting amongst themselves for players. But there are always good ways to "advertise" your guild to the right people, so that when a good raider is looking for a place to hang their hat, you can make sure they find you.
By "your moment" I mean that one, shining, crystalline moment of clarity when you finally feel like you 'get' World of Warcraft and why you play it. Technically as a player you could have many such moments - perhaps the first time you make a kill in PvP and finally feel like you understand how to do it, or the first time you successfully run an instance, or the first time you tank a major boss, or the first time your raid drops a major progession milestone... but it's just as likely to be when you dinged 40 and got your mount, or first stepped through the Dark Portal into outland. It's unique to you and yet you may well share it with hundreds if not more of your fellow players.
For me, the biggest moment was also my biggest screwup - tanking Onyxia in PvP gear with a 2h weapon. It made the game really click for me because 20 people pulled together in the face of my colossal screwup to kill Ony anyway. I've really never felt closer to a guild before or since than I did at that moment, and I've never had such a feeling of triumph when the boss finally hit the ground. It wasn't our first Ony kill, we were on much more challenging content, and I've since gone on to raid level 70 instances... but that Ony kill was special.
So I ask you, gentle (and not so gentle) readers: what was your moment? Have you had it yet?
Here's a topic I almost feel like I've been talking about too much lately, but there is some good news to report. Neth confirms, once again, that Blizzard is planning on streamlining the experience from 1-58, and then adds something else: there are changes, big changes in terms of "detailed quests," being added to Dustwallow Marsh. And while we heard mention of Dustwallow Marsh before, this is the first time I've ever heard it mentioned in conjunction with 1-58 specifically. It seems like Blizzard is actually planning to bring about new content for people who haven't yet hit 60.
And that is pretty exciting. So what might be going down in Dustwallow? Jaina Proudmoore is there in Theramore, and of course she's got some old ties to Arthas, so something might be happening in that vein. Onyxia has taken residence in Dustwallow (when she's not masquerading in Stormwind), and we've also heard rumblings in Outland that Deathwing may be making an appearance in either Azeroth (or Northrend) soon. And Dustwallow is also very near to Alcaz Island, which used to be where a certain missing King was previously seen ingame. Or it could be something completely new, of course, that we haven't even heard of yet.
At any rate, it's cool to hear that midlevel content is coming, even if it's in a pretty unexpected place (still no Heroic Deadmines plans?). Get ready to go back to Dustwallow Marsh.
Though after seeing Onyxia 5-manned post-Burning Crusade, it seems like 40 players of any class would be able to take her down, I wonder who would tank in a 40-priest raid. (Apparently a shadow priest holding aggro with Mind Blast.) Watch the power of 40 Shadow Word: Pains!
As usual with WoW patches, patch 2.4.2 includes a couple of wild bugs. My personal favorites(and by favorites I mean I absolutely hate them) are the bugs(changes?) to the Archimonde encounter.
The dust has settled on most of the servers, and the 
This thread over on the forums
Here's an interesting observation: after patch 2.4 drops, 
Here's a good question from Strykt on the forums: 
Relmstein has a great tongue-in-cheek guide up about 
Here's a topic I almost feel like I've been talking about too much lately, but there is some good news to report. Neth confirms, once again, that Blizzard is planning on streamlining the experience from 1-58, and then adds something else: there are changes, big changes 
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