A pretty fun forum thread caught the attention of Bornakk and many, many regular posters as well. The player Course of Medivh-US asks a question: If your character said one last thing upon dying, what would it be? A majority of the responses were comedy answers, and only a handful leaned over to the serious side. The jokes were pretty hit or miss, but I got a few laughs out of it. Among my favorites...
"Haha, you fool! You fell for one of the classic blunders, the first of which is, "never get involved in a land war in Kalimdor." Only slightly less well-known is this; never go in against a Gnome when death is on the line! Hahahaha... *dies*"
"Pat? What pat?"
"wwwwwwwwssssssssssddddddddaaawdssssd"
"Et tu, Brutallus?"
"With my dying breath, I curse Kalgan!"
Being an RP nerd, my characters would probably say something more serious. My Priest would lament her failures or regret she couldn't have done more before the end. My Paladin probably wouldn't say anything. She would just harden a defiant glare and pass on. If we were leaning to the silly side, my Shadow Priest would probably say something like, "Whoops, shouldn't have hit Shadow Word: Death there." Actually, I probably say that a lot already... but let's not talk about that. Let's extend this to you guys: What would your character say with their final breath? Heck, how do you envision your character taking the final spill? Old and grey on their deathbed, going peacefully? Being cut down in glorious battle? Blowing themselves up while skilling up Engineering?
Haven't been to Sunwell yet? Sure, you say it's that you don't have time to raid, or that maybe you just can't find a guild that vibes with you, or that raiding is pointless until the expansion releases. But we know the truth: deep down inside, you really do want to go, but you're just not good enough. Worry not, you noob: the good folks at SK Gaming (whom we've interviewed in the past) are here to let you experience the instance anyway. You may not have the healing prowess needed to stand up with the big boys, but they do and they're streaming the whole thing live over the internet, complete with commentary and two points of view.
The show starts at 2pm EDT tomorrow afternoon, and to see it, you've got to pick up Joost, which is a free download, for Windows or OS X. They're set to talk mostly, they say, about Warriors, Mages, and Paladins, as well as UI setups, and they're also planning to attempt a world record for DPS on Brutallus.
Should be fun to see, and if nothing else, you can pretend to be a raider. Take that, Brutallus! Have another Frostbolt!
Tank Talk continues this week with one requisite "Why does my ingame life have to suck so hard?" story in deference to a point made by commenters on our first column. We will then take a look at the most fundamental decision you will encounter as a raiding tank -- and one you are likely to make, and then re-make, on just about every boss encounter in the game.
There is a Druid on my server who messages me almost daily asking me to come tank his heroics. What annoys me is not being asked to tank per se, but that he, too, is a feral Druid. His gear isn't as good as mine simply because he hasn't raided past Magtheridon, but he's sitting on at least three of the better pieces of Tier 4, crafted epics, and several of the badge pieces that I'm still using to tank Tier 6. At a matter of fact, with the advent of two different badge vendors and badge drops from 10-man and 25-man bosses, his stats are significantly better than the ones I had tanking most of Tier 5. This guy literally has the gear to do just about anything in the game short of the more advanced content in Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau, and I used to point to him with no small measure of Druidic pride as proof of what a little elbow grease could accomplish.
But he still wants me to come tank for him.
I started getting irritated with the constant begging at one point and asked him, "How can you possibly have any difficulty getting groups? Everybody in LFG is looking for a tank, and your gear is excellent."
At his computer, I'm sure he was shrugging. "You do it faster than I do."
"I really don't. Just get some good DPS and you'll be fine."
And then the truth came out: "Well, I don't really like tanking. I'd rather DPS."
Welcome to Hybrid Theory, where we discuss all things hybrid in the World of Warcraft. Hybrid Theory is brought to you each week by columnist/blogger Alex Ziebart.
I really thought my excitement over Wrath of the Lich King would fade after the initial onslaught of alpha information and just come back around launch time, but that hasn't really been the case. It's been a pretty consistent type of excitement, and I pretty much devour every piece of information I can find.
We've talked about Druids already, but while I love Hybrids in general, my Shadow Priest is my main and my first love. Yes yes, I'm sure some of you still disagree with Priests being Hybrids, but I'm of the opinion that they are so I shall continue. If you want to disagree, do so in the Comments section below.
I adore playing my Shadow Priest, but I think all Shadow Priest players agree with me when I say there are some definite issues with the class on some level or another. Why don't we take a seat and see what might be on the devs' minds, eh?
I've been farming a lot of ghost mushrooms and gromsblood lately in order to make Demonslaying Elixirs. My guild's farming trash in Sunwell Plateau at the moment and has taken a few half-hearted swings at Kalecgos, all of which ended in much hollering and arguing and waving of hands in the air. But despite the fact that Big Blue is likely to ride our collective ass for weeks, I like to think of myself as a long-term planner with a gimlet eye on Brutallus. So, a-farming I go.
The materials for the elixir are fairly irritating to farm in quantity, and I find myself in a lot of areas I never even leveled extensively in when I was raising my Druid main. Desolace? Paid it a visit to get some fishing done. Blasted Lands? Uh...passed through it on my way to Outland. Maraudon? Did I do that? I want to say I did, but was brought up short at learning of the existence of a scepter that allows you to bypass two-thirds of the instance. I know for sure I've never set foot in Dire Maul North, much less a Tribute Run, I'd never seen the live side of Stratholme, and I hadn't so much as clapped eyes on the Emperor in Blackrock Depths.
Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, ZA or Sunwell Plateau, everyone can get in on the action and spend thousands of gold on repairs and consumables. This week, a pit lord dies.
Brutallus is the second boss in the Sunwell Plateau. A pit lord with swords for hands, he becomes accessible once you've redeemed Kalecgos and killed the two trash packs behind Kalecgos' platform. After watching a short event where Brutallus fights and kills Madrigosa, a blue dragon who you can see taunting him when doing the Dead Scar bombing quest, it's time to face the demon himself.
Many people have compared the Brutallus encounter to that of Patchwerk back in Naxxramas; rather than an execution encounter, this is a benchmark fight, and if your raid is low on DPS, your tanks fall short of gear requirements or your healers can't keep up, you'll run into difficulties. The main requirement is extremely high raid dps; with a 6 minute enrage and 10.5 million hitpoints, you're looking at just over 29k raid dps sustained over the entire fight. How much that works out to per DPSer depends on your raid composition, so let's look at what you need to bring for the fight.
This puts the first gate opening time at just about 2 weeks (the patch went live on March 25th, as you recall). If the next two gates come down just as fast, we may see a world first Kil'jaedan kill somewhere around early May. Then again, I imagine Blizzard wants to drag stuff out just a tiny bit so that they don't need to put out a patch 2.5 with new content between now and the release of Wrath of the Lich King.
Every week, Alex Ziebart comes to you with Hybrid Theory. A column with... theories about hybrids, I guess. I mean, that's what it says at least. I guess it could be something else, but probably not. Honestly, you should probably just read it and find out for yourself.
In the past here on Hybrid Theory, we've discussed what Hybrids are capable of doing in a raid, as far as beneficial talents and utilities. We talked about the fact that a few well-placed hybrids in your raid can take your DPS from 'good' to 'horrifyingly good.' All of this comes to the front again in a boss that many high-end raid groups are clashing against right now: Brutallus.
If you haven't read anything on this boss yet, it's the single largest gear check in WoW yet. It's Burning Crusade's Patchwerk, mostly. To beat Brutallus, you need roughly 29,000 sustained DPS across your entire raid. If you don't pull that off, you hit his enrage timer and he destroys all of you. Simple as that! If you're lucky you can burn off a final two or three percent of his health after the enrage, but that's about as far as you go. That three percent is about 300,000 health, so don't get too confident.
The flag ship raiding guild Nihilum has released a great video of them taking on Brutallus, one of the new 25 man Sunwell Plateau bosses. The video is available from several sources, and the downloaded version is of quite high quality. The version provided above, a stream from File Front, is also pretty good.
The video itself is taken from the standpoint of their main tank, Kungen, and runs for just over seven minutes. Most interesting is the additional pieces of information Nihilum provides about their raid setup. For guilds attempting him, looking at a successful raid composition can be a major piece of information. The raid setup Nihilum uses is:
There's nothing too earth shattering, though any Shamans out there who have been trying a dual-wield elemental hybrid build might be feeling a bit set back, since quite a few +spell damage one handers have been changed to main hand only, namely Sedai's Blade, Terokk's Gavel, Archmage's Guile, Seeker's Gavel, K'iru's Presage, and the Battle-mace of the High Priestess. Those of you jewelcrafters who have been feeling guilty about killing your poor Nightseye Panther will be happy to know that it now only fades away instead of dying when its buff ends.
Finally, one documented non-change: The chat filtering problems that the notes claim were fixed are still present on live servers. Hortus confirmed that the fix had some bad side effects and was pulled at the last minute, but will hopefully reappear in a future patch.
We'll keep watching for any other changes to pop up, so keep it tuned here to WoW Insider.
After writing one of my first articles on an essay penned by Neg, one of Nihilum's resto Shaman, I was surprised and heartened to see him get in touch. We talked about a few matters related to our pieces and I asked him if he would mind answering some questions about what the guild's been up to since we spoke to them last. We hadn't heard much about Nihilum on the PTR (Vis Maior was the guild steamrolling the content this time out), but they've been upgrading and expanding their website, and one of the 2.4 raiding screenshots on Wowwiki belongs to them, so they've obviously been busy. It had also become clear that Awake, arguably their most high profile member, had left the guild, and I was curious about what was going on.
Neg very graciously answered my questions, which you'll find below the cut. Read on for his take on Sunwell Plateau and his favorite boss, Awake's departure, resto Shamans versus holy Paladins, picking up an enhancement Shaman and the class in PvP, various boss encounters, and WoW as an e-sport.
So with patch 2.4 coming on us soon, I was thinking about it, and I have to say that I can't remember the last time I was filled with this much anticipation over a patch. Aside from 1.8, which made Feral Druids viable, this might be my favorite patch. But why do I love it? Why can't I wait until the servers come up on patch day and we're allowed in?
Let me count the ways! Here's 7 relatively simple reasons that I am watching my computer like a hawk, waiting for 2.4 to make it live.
We reached our 25th episode of the podcast this last Saturday, and it's all up right now for you to listen to over on WoW Radio's site. Turpster (who, I hear, has posted something on Massively today), Matthew Rossi, and I all sat down to talk about all the biggest stories in World of Warcraft over the past week, including, but not limited to:
And we answered a bunch of reader mail, including who our pick to direct the upcoming WoW movie would be, now that the writer's strike is settled.
I'll give you a hint: it's not Uwe Boll. Listen in to the podcast every Saturday afternoon starting at 3:30pm EST on WoW Radio, and hear intelligent er, interesting, um, audible commentary like this every single week! And in the meantime, if you have something want to share with us, feel free to drop an email to theshow@wowinsider.com, and you may hear us talk about it on the next show.
Enjoy this week's podcast, and we'll see you next week.
A few days ago it was reported on the PTR that those dastardly evildoers of dastardly deeds (aka: Warlocks) managed to enslave Brutallus. These vile locks then took their newly enslaved demon out to play. And playing for a creature of pure darkness means letting them wreak havoc onto the unsuspecting citizens of the Isle of Quel'Danas. I would have expected a hotfix to this almost immediately, and some form of public announcement that the bug has been fixed. However as of Saturday at 7 p.m. EST, there has been no such luck. Instead, Blizzard decided to hotfix the Brutallus encounter inside Sunwell Plateau, the new 25 man raid.
The hotfixes Blizzard has given the encounter are:
Yes, it's that time of the week again. Our illustrious podcast goes live tomorrow afternoon at 3:30pm EST on WoW Radio, and while it probably won't be as crazy as last week, we've got another fun-packed show for you. This week, Matthew Rossi will be on with Turpster and I, so we'll hear what he has to say about warriors and shamans in 2.4. Plus, we've got Love is in the Air news to cover, as well as Brutallus running rampant (and M'uru going missing), and what an official version of mobile WoW might mean.
Log in to WoW Radio tomorrow at 3:30pm EST, and log on to IRC at irc.mmoirc.com in the #wowradio channel to chat with us and all the other listeners. See you then.
A pretty fun forum thread caught the attention of Bornakk and many, many regular posters as well. The player Course of Medivh-US asks a question: If your character said one last thing upon dying, what would it be? A majority of the responses were comedy answers, and only a handful leaned over to the serious side. The jokes were pretty hit or miss, but I got a few laughs out of it. Among my favorites...
2.4.1's had a 
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