Archive for World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft Wednesday: Naxxramas

November 23, 2011 World of Warcraft No comments

Lore:

During Vanilla, Naxxramas was the Scourge’s southern command post, allowing Kel’Thuzad to relay Arthas’ orders to their agents in the Plaguelands.

Unfortunately for ol’ Thuzi, a group of adventurers broke in, stole the powerful Ashbringer sword, and crippled Naxx’s production. So Arthas recalled it to Northrend where we…raid it again. I guess.

Degree of Difficulty: Medium

The trash is all very simple, though densely packed. There are a few areas (specifically in the Construct Quarter) where clearing the trash is less important than running the maze.

At level the bosses provide a modest challenge:

In the Arachnid Quarter:
-Anub’Rekhan: a Nerubian who spawns several adds during the fight
-Grand Widow Faerlina: Does some nice poison damage in addition to sacrificing worshipers.
-Maexxna: A giant spider who poisons and throws you.

In the Plague Quarter:
-Noth the Plaguebringer: A death knight/mage who has some pretty nasty curses that need to be dispelled.
-Heigan the Unclean: Shoots deadly plague out of the ground, but in a pattern, so you can avoid it if you recognize the scheme.
-Loatheb: A fungal giant with a plethora of nasty diseases.

In the Military Quarter:

-Instructor Razuvious: The chief Death Knight trainer, his fight involves mind controlling his two students into attacking him.
-Gothik the Harvester: You need to fend off waves of adds for four minutes before wiping him out.
-The Four Horseman: A difficult battle between four bosses in four corners of the room at the same time. Each have marks that you can’t allow to stack too high, so tank rotation is key.

In the Construct Quarter:
-Patchwerk: A pretty easy fight against a hard hitting abomination. Just keep DPSing him from behind.
-Grobbulus: Another abomination, he drops adds and has a nasty cast that will cause one member of the raid to spray AoE damage and drop a poison cloud.
-Gluth: A dog. He reduces healing, spawns zombie adds (which heal him if he eats them) and will drop your health to 5% every 90 seconds.
-Thaddius: An abomination with two adds (Feugen and Stalagg). The fight takes place on multiple platforms. Depending on whether you have a positive or negative “charge” you may need to switch platforms multiple times to be with raid members of your same charge.

At the Top Level:
-Sapphiron: A huge bone dragon, he summons a giant ice storm that AoEs down the party, as well as a flying attack that will kill you unless you hide behind an ice blocked raid member.
-Kel’Thuzad: The fight starts with a wave of mobs to kill, moves into a gimmicky fight with mind control, ground AoE and wasting ice blocks, and ends with a standard brawl against Thuzad and two adds.

Special Features:

Killing mobs in this raid grants you reputation with either the Alliance Vanguard, or whatever faction’s tabard you are currently wearing. The quest to gain entrance to the Occulus instance used to start here, but has since been removed.

Recommended for Levels: 80

Naxx is a hard instance to figure. It’s size and winged theme has made it tremendously popular, especially amongst retro raiders longing for the glory days of 40 Man Naxx during the game’s earliest days.

However, it hasn’t aged well, unfortunately. The gimmicks seem extra gimmicky these days, and there’s not much challenge to be found in finishing the raid. Plus, none of the drops are particularly good, even at level, anymore. Skip it. Run it when you’re 85 to get a nostalgia kick. Maybe.

World of Warcraft: Halls of Reflection

November 17, 2011 World of Warcraft No comments

Lore:

Last time we checked in, we’d snuck around to the back of Icecrown Citadel, and were ready to break in. And hey! We found the secret chamber where Arthas stores his horrible sword Frostmorne. Why, that almost sounds like a trap!

And it totally is. As soon as you break in with Jaina or Syvanis, Arthas sweeps in with his lieutenants Falric and Marwyn and traps you in the halls. Your help gets either killed or runs after Arthas, so it’s up to you to stop Falric and Marwyn once and for all.

Degree of Difficulty: Hard

Halls of Reflection gets sort of a bad rap because the trash can be difficult for an unprepared groups. There are 8 waves of fighters, a few of which (the Rifleman, Mage, and Footsoldier) that provide very little difficulty. But the Mercenary can hit extremely hard and the Priest has a heal and a fear. The enemies should be killed with this in mind, and can be bunched by breaking their line of sight in one of the alcoves.

Falric and Marwyn constitute the two bosses for the instance, and both are difficult but not hard. Falric has a stun and some hard shadow damage attacks. Marwyn has some really heavy damage attacks, including one that can effectively half your HP pool. The final “boss fight” is just an escape from the tower, killing off several waves of adds as quickly as possible so you can get past blockades. If your group comes in contact with Arthas (who is chasing you very, very slowly) you will wipe and have to start the event over.

Special Features:

The instance is available in normal and Heroic modes. Killing mobs in the instance will net you reputation with the Alliance or Horde Expedition if you run without a reputation tabard. Bringing the Battered Hilt into the instance starts an event in which Uther Lightbring warns you away from Frostmorne. The group then has to fight a possessed Quel’Delar, a relatively simple fight. Successfully defeating it furthers the owner’s quest to temper the sword.

Recommended for Levels: 80 (Normal)/80 (Heroic)

If you get used to it, Halls of Reflection is easily the best Wrath of the Lich King instance. The lore is great, with Arthas interacting with your group. The fights are fun and keep you on your toes (including a fun, but avoidable fight against your own group), and the boss fights aren’t too difficult.

It’s definitely worth a run-through, even today. The full story arc of the three Icecrown instances is among the best in the game, and Halls of Reflection is a worthy conclusion. The gear is even very good at level, and there’s a fair bit of XP to earn (though not as much as other, similarly leveled dungeons).

Top Ten BlizzCon Announcements

October 29, 2011 World of Warcraft No comments

1. Commit to World of Warcraft for One Year, Get Diablo 3 Free. In an effort to stem the tide of users that would no doubt switch to Star Wars The Old Republic for a few months in December, Blizzard is giving away one of its premier titles for free for anyone who commits to spending $179.88 on WoW next year, plus you get a mount in the next patch. That ultimately seems like a losing proposition (a lot of fans would be willing to pay the $179, plus the $60 for Diablo), but it’s great PR and will keep a lot of players paying for at least another year.

2. Mists of Pandaria It’s Pandas, it’s Pokemon, it’s the kneejerk reaction to everybody who said Cataclysm was “too hard” and forgot that most of the new content was in 1-60 not 80-85. But still, Mists of Panderia looks fantastic, sounds great, and plays pretty good. More on that later.

3. New Neutral Race The Pandarens experience starts off completely unafilliated with either the Horde or Alliance, and as you start questing up to level 10, you’e gradually introduced to the factions until you choose one at the end of the starter area. It’s a cool experiment, though mostly you’ll probably just pick to go with whatever faction all your other characters are.

4. New Monk Class Monks are an interesting new class. Every race but Worgen and Goblins have access to them, and they’re a leather based class. The most interesting feature announced thus far is that they’re entirely button based. There’s no auto attack, so you’ll be hitting buttons for every punch, kick, and special ability. I don’t know how much I like that in theory across end game content, but I had a lot of fun playing through the first five levels.

5. Literally Pokemon The new pet battle isn’t “like” Pokemon, it isn’t “inspired by” Pokemon. It is Pokemon. With wild pets appearing in the tall grass of Elwynn and Gym Leaders and everything. I don’t know how good this could possibly be, or even if it will end up going the way of the dance studio and never going in the game, but I think I like this better than a new profession.

6. Blizzard DotA Isn’t Dead. After it was announced last year, rumors whirled that Blizzard DotA was going to be cancelled. Apparently it just wasn’t particularly interesting, and it’s a free game, so it made a sort of sense for it to be shelved. But then this year it was back, in sort of a humorous form. Take control of a popular Blizzard character and his/her minions and run around killing other players for the sole purpose of advancing on the leaderboard. Coming soonish.

7. Blizzard Lore Bibles Coming Soon. In tandem with the Diablo III release, Blizzard put together a Diablo III Lore book, written in the first person by Diablo loremaster Deckard Cain. It was announced that similar books are being compiled for Warcraft and Starcraft as well.

8. Heart of the Swarm Looks Pretty Cool, Has New Units. Not much new info was dropped about heart of the Swarm, but the new trailer (rendered in-game according to Blizzard) looks fantastic, and there are several new units for Zerg, Protoss, and Terran for South Korean gamer teams to exploit.

9. No Warcraft IV. This announcement was just sort of slipped in and one I confirmed later with a conversation with a Blizzard employee. Apparently, they see WoW as having around ten more years left in its cycle, and have no interest in creating Warcraft IV before the WoW train has completely run out of steam. Ten years? I don’t know about that, but it doesn’t look like Warcraft IV is in the cards any time soon.

10. WoW’s Talent System May Be Gone. Another thing people are whining about, but the classic WoW Talent tree is a thing of the past, giving way to a more flexible, more passive talent system that will gift you all your necessary spells and let you pick some less intense, more passive talents to utilize every 15 levels. I’m not really sure how this doesn’t encourage “cookie cutter builds” that WoW has been trying to get away from for years (in fact it just enforces them through the mechanics) but there we go.

YouTube Monday: Kung-Fu Pandas

October 25, 2011 World of Warcraft No comments

The biggest announcement at BlizzCon this year? That a year’s subscription to World of Warcraft will give you a free copy of Diablo 3.

Oh, but the second biggest announcement? The new World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria. Is it weird? Really. Does it make no sense? Kinda. But is it sort of awesome? Yep. I had a chance to play through some of it at the convention, and these Pandas are kind of badass. It’s not played for laughs, and the zones look and sound wonderful.

So keep an open mind as you watch the trailer for Mists of Pandaria:

YouTube: Red Shirts

October 18, 2011 World of Warcraft, YouTube No comments

It’s worth noting that Blizzcon brings the best and worst of nerddom to bear every year. My friend who is getting married this weekend is a good nerd. The people who sit and bitch all day on the internet? Bad nerds.

This guy is like…the best of both worlds. Owning Blizzard’s creative staff at their own event is pretty awesome. But then again…well….

YouTube Monday: Blizzcon 2011

October 18, 2011 World of Warcraft, YouTube No comments

Amongst a whole heap of other things I’ve been wrangled into doing, I’m going to check out out Blizzcon once again this year.

Don’t know what that is? Don’t care? Too bad. Here’s the promotional video for this year’s event. Check back in the coming weeks for more coverage from the show, which I should hopefully get a chance to check out in depth.

World of Warcraft Wednesday: Pit of Saron

October 12, 2011 World of Warcraft No comments

Lore:

Skirting along the outside of Icecrown to find a back entrance proves to be somewhat difficult. It turns out that Arthas, uh…knows that he’s got a back entrance? And so there’s a whole lot of bad dudes protecting the entrance and slaves in the back yard.

So, we’re going to go ahead, free an army of slaves and try to find our way into the back door of Arthas’ palace. Why we didn’t just fly in here, I’m not really sure. But it sure as heck would’ve been a better idea than slogging our way through a giant Saronite mine. You know, the quasi-metal/quasi-blood that makes you go insane?

Degree of Difficulty: Medium

There’s quite a bit of Trash, some of which can be quite challenging. The Flamebringers blocking the ramp up to the upper level of the instance and the Plageborn Horrors that drop acid on the ground provide the most difficulty for groups new to the instance.

The bosses provide a moderate challenge as well. Forgemaster Garfrost can kill you with an AoE if you don’t stick behind the boulder he throws at you, but then it’s pretty much all DPS. Krick and Ick have some annoying mechanics (filling the ground with mines, a hard poison AoE), but once you get the mechanics down it’s fairly easy. Tyrannus is annoying (and not just because he resets so easily), but because he has a hard knockback, a stun, and a buff that channels all the damage he’s taking into one of the party, forcing you to dial back DPS. Also, his mount Rimefang will freeze a random player during all this. Bleh.

Special Features:

The instance is available in normal and Heroic modes. Killing mobs in the instance will net you reputation with the Alliance or Horde Expedition if you run without a reputation tabard. Mobs in this instance have a low chance to drop the broken hilt, an epic quest item that ends with you getting a (vastly outleveled) epic weapon. You can move directly from this instance to the next in the line (Halls of Reflection) via a portal that opens upon killing the Tyrannus.

Recommended for Levels: 80 (Normal)/80 (Heroic)

This is another really good instance in the three leading up to the Icecrown Citadel instance. Pit of the Saron is the most sprawling, and probably the second most difficult to run at level.

The gear that drops here is good, at level, and you’ll probably get more XP here than any other instance of the set. Still, the mechanics of this place are fairly annoying, but there’s some good story here, and it’s definitely worth doing at least once as part of the set.

World of Warcraft: Forge of Souls

October 6, 2011 World of Warcraft No comments

Lore:

We’ve driven on Ice Crown, and we’re ready to attack! But while the brunt of the Alliance and Horde forces try to assault the gate, the players and either Sylvannis or Jaina (depending on your faction) decide to head up a group sneaking into a side door.

The first stop is the source of a large percentage of the Lich King’s power, his soul forge. Jaina kind of just leaves you to, it so it’s your job to fight through the forge and see what lies on the other side.

Degree of Difficulty: Medium

The trash is really pretty easy. They’re bunched up, but none of them is horribly dangerous, and so long as you don’t pull multiple groups, you won’t have any issues. The wraiths at the end of the instance hit surprisingly hard, but aren’t horrid.

There are only two bosses in the instance, but both are surprisingly difficult. Bronjam seems easy, mostly because his abilities don’t hit very hard, but he can constantly heal himself unless the DPS pays attention to the soul shards he pulls out of party members. They walk slowly towards Bronjam and you have to kill them before he touches them.

The Devourer of Souls comes in three stages. In the first it buffs random players and shares any damage the party does between them. In phase two it deals a bunch of AoE damage via some unhittable wraiths. In phase three it fires a beam that scans the room. If you get caught in the beam, you are essentially sure to die.

Special Features:

The instance is available in normal and Heroic modes. Killing mobs in the instance will net you reputation with the Alliance or Horde Expedition if you run without a reputation tabard. Mobs in this instance have a low chance to drop the broken hilt, an epic quest item that ends with you getting a (vastly outleveled) epic weapon. You can move directly from this instance to the next in the line (Pit of Saron) via a portal that opens upon killing the Devourer.

Recommended for Levels: 80 (Normal)/80 (Heroic)

Blizzard did a really good job with the three instances leading up to the Icecrown Raid. The story that connects the three raids is light, but interesting, and they all are neither too hard nor too easy.

If you have any interest in the Arthas storyline, or if you just like well made instances, definitely check this one out. With all the damage nerfs and overpowered gear/heirlooms it won’t be too difficult for you and a couple other people to power through the forge.

World of Warcraft Wednesday: Trial of the Champion

September 28, 2011 World of Warcraft No comments

Lore:

Uh..heh. Ok. So, thanks to the combined effort of the Horde, Alliance, Kirin Tor, Red Dragonflight, Knights of the Ebon Blade and Argent Crusade, we’ve reached the gates of Ice Crown Citadel. So what’s the next step?

If your answer is: Hold a Renaissance Faire complete with play jousting and fake duels, you win! That’s right, defacto leader of the assault on Arthas, Tirion Fordring figured that it would be an awesome idea to figure out who the best fighters were by holding a contest. Can you play fight harder than anybody else? Let’s find out!

Degree of Difficulty: Easy

There is no trash to speak of. A few of the bosses have buffer mobs you need to kill, but they are extremely simple, and there’s usually only a handful of them per encounter, including the Joust.

The first set of bosses you’ll fight twice, first as a joust, second as a standard fight, against the “champions” of the five original races of the opposite faction, a Mage, as Shaman, a Hunter, a Rogue, and a Warrior. A decently challenging fight (especially with the healer and Rogue up), but not horrible. Paletress will annoy you with a heals, DoTs, Fear, and a summon that will pull an easy version of a boss from a previous dungeon into the fight. Eadric comes with standard Palladin abilities, annoying as ever.

The final fight is a three part affair with the Black Knight from the Argent Tournament questline. His physical form is very easy with nothing special. His skeletal form is a bit harder, as he summons exploding ghouls that do a fair bit of damage. The Wraith form is simple enough, but the constant AoE and damage buffs will kill off a party weakened by the earlier parts of the fight.

Special Features:

The instance is available in normal and Heroic modes. Killing mobs in the instance will net you reputation with the Alliance or Horde Expedition if you run without a reputation tabard. The first fight of the instance (the Joust) is a vehicle fight, which requires you to have a lance equipped and be mounted (lances and mounts are provided). Killing bosses awards Champion Seals, which can be spent at Argent Tournament stores.

Recommended for Levels: 80 (Normal)/80 (Heroic)

You’re either going to love or hate the Trial of the Champion. I like it because it’s different. The fights are varied, and it’s a nice change of pace from the same loot corridor dungeons that we’re so used to. Plus none of the fights are particularly hard.

But a lot of people hate it. Jousting and the Black Knight fight are very luck based sometimes, and a lot of people just plain hate the jousting mechanic anyway. So try it out, see if you’re one of those who likes this sort of change-up, and if you are, run it a few times to stack up some Champions Tokens so you can grab some extra pets and mounts for your collections.

World of Warcraft: The Culling of Stratholme

September 23, 2011 World of Warcraft No comments

Lore:

We’re back in time again, this time trying to stop the Infinite Dragonflight from killing Arthas before he can burn an entire human city to the ground, get caught up in the chase for Mal’Ganis and become the Lich King.

Wait…we’re trying to stop them from stopping Arthas from becoming the Lich King? In what world does that make sense? Why! In the World of Warcraft, of course! You don’t want to mess up the time stream of a crazy mass-murdering death machine, right? I mean…things might actually have gone well!

Degree of Difficulty: Easy

The trash here spawns in several waves along with some non-elite zombie mobs that respawn until the second phase of the instance. The second phase, an alley, is clogged with more trash, but none present any problem.

The Bosses are quite easy. Meathook spawns early and hits hard, but doesn’t do much. Salramm, a necromancer, spawns shortly thereafter, and manages to do less (other than a damage buff/debuff). You fight Chrono-Lord Epoch with Arthas in tow, and he has an annoying stun and slowdown, but is otherwise unimpressive. Mal’Ganis is another Arthas Fight and other than his AoE DoT and sleep, he goes down pretty quickly.

There’s another boss, if you can finish the instance in the first 25 minutes on Heroic (not at all difficult). He has a nasty DoT and magic attack, but is mostly an easy fight. You’ll want to kill him if you haven’t though, because he has a 100% chance to drop a bronze drake mount.

Special Features:

The instance is available in normal and Heroic modes. Killing mobs in the instance will net you reputation with the Alliance or Horde Expedition if you run without a reputation tabard. You’ll want to run it at least once to get your drake mount.

Recommended for Levels: 78 (Normal)/80 (Heroic)

There’s a lot of story told in this instance that’s really important to the Wrath of the Lich King storyline (which is now irrelevant, but still), and it’s cool to play a Warcraft 3 mission from on the ground.

Between that and the Bronze Drake, a lot of people have a lot of love for Culling of Stratholme, and I’m one of them. The artificial timer imposed by the timed enemy and boss spawns is a bit annoying, but a good group will clear this instance in almost no time, leaving you with decent gear, XP, and a new mount.

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