Matticus

Matticus is the founder of World of Matticus, a World of Warcraft blog.

Flame Leviathan Thoughts

by

flame-leviathan

Yeah there’s going to be a buttload of spoilers here. You probably don’t want to read any further than this.

Tuesday afternoon, Blizzard announced the new PTR boss testing schedules for the week. Flame Leviathan (Normal) would be open from 4 PM onwards. But it looks like someone was trigger happy and they decided to pop it open an hour earlier. I happened to be on right as it opened up and sounded the alarm on Twitter, my guild, and in the WoW Insider war room. Alex Ziebert, shadow Priest extraordinaire, was able to join me. Once we filled up, we got the ball rolling.

So what kind of vehicle does a big, badass Dwarf drive around when he’s feeling bloodthirsty?

siege

That’s right. It’s the only vehicle fit for a dwarf. It’s big. It’s got rams. And it’s got guns. I let someone else drive while I manned the guns on top. After talking to Bronzebeard, we started the event and the Alliance 1st Armored division rolled out of the garage. The division consisted of two tanks, two demolishers and two choppers (bikes). The two siege engines lead the way absorbing the brunt of the Iron army. Demo’s formed up on the rear and attacked at range while choppers were cleaning up anything else that got behind the siege engines.

1st Armored decided to start off with gunnery training. Most of us had no idea what to do so it made sense to start firing on anything that moved and any structures that were destructible. We literally rolled over the opposition with little difficulty.

WoWScrnShot_030309_152037
WoWScrnShot_030309_152240

Click on pictures to enlarge

I found the gun controls were quite stiff to move. It’s like the engineers forgot to add WD-40 to the damn turrets or something. If you’ve ever done Wintergrasp, the controls for aiming are quite easy. You hold down your right mouse button to aim the direction of the camera and the targeting reticle changes direction accordingly. But it’s different in Ulduar. I found that it wasn’t as fluid nor as smooth.

After clearing out the towers, one of the recon choppers noted what looked like a repair pad on the side. We gathered up and repaired our vehicles to full health. Up ahead there was a gate flanked by two Ulduar Colossi.

WoWScrnShot_030309_152927 
WoWScrnShot_030309_152001

Up: Repair pad
Down: Ulduar Colossus

The Colossus is pretty damn large. But the larger they are, the harder they fall. They more really slow, too. I told my driver to switch with me because I had a hunch the vehicle would have a larger vehicle pool. Blizzard did say vehicles would scale with gear. Sure enough, my tank jumped from ~750k health to ~810k.

Matticus was in the hot seat now.

WoWScrnShot_030309_153816
WoWScrnShot_030309_161105

Left: Matt tries to take on the Flame Leviathan to no avail
Right: Matt flooring it after realizing the above the strategy is not working

“Matt! Run! Hit the gas!”
”WTF do you think I’m doing?! Twiddling my thumbs?!”

We didn’t last much longer after that. But I found it a lot of fun. And it is absolutely nothing like Malygos phase 3. Players who have an aversion to vehicle encounters should definitely give this a try at least. And if they hate it, they’ll hate it. But at least try it with a clean slate. Worse comes to worse, if you don’t like driving or shooting, you can be one of the brave souls willing to be thrown on to the top of the Flame Leviathan.

WoWScrnShot_030309_164623

Pretty neat bug where a demo has grappled another demo. There’s still some quirks to be resolved. Towards the end, Alex grappled me onto his demo. I was unfortunately stuck and had no idea how to eject myself. I don’t think I was loaded into the launching arm.

Our best attempt was around 35% before our live raids forced us to cancel out.

Ignis is going to be available for testing today. Try to be on about an hour earlier to avoid the queues that is going to be prevalent. I’ll be in there at around 3 to see if I can scramble some players.

For Flame Leviathan strategy, try checking out Stratfu.

33 Raid Healing UIs

by

As healers, we are all unified by our singular dedication to our craft: Restoring life. But this is where our similarities end. Some of us like to click. Others rely on keys. Players prefer being overloaded with information. Minimalists prefer more “white space”.

From Plusheal, I’ve gathered a collection of diverse raiding UIs that healers had to offer. For those of you looking to simplify or expand your healing UI somewhat, maybe this will help spark some inspiration.

Grid healers

Evissadia – Holy Priest

evissadia

Gerunna – Resto Shaman

Gerunna

Kallisti – Holy Paladin

kallisti

Crutches – Holy Paladin

crutches

Evilhalo – Holy Priest

Evilhalo

Tulani – Holy Priest

tulani

Ayslin – Holy Priest

Ayslin

Healson – Holy Priest

healson 

Lightpelt – Resto Druid

lightpelt

Kuraj – Discipline Priest

kuraj

Myna – Resto Druid

myna

Lilitharien – Discipline Priest

Lilitharien

Minischoles – Resto Druid

Minischoles

Reviamjolly – Discipline Priest

Reviamjolly

Tequiladin – Resto Druid

tequilakin

Englar – Holy Priest

Englar

Other UI healers

Sacrales – Holy Paladin

sacrales

Avonar – Holy Priest

Avonar

Dallarus – Resto Druid

dallarus

Nattydread – Holy Priest

nattydread

Rainomi – Holy Paladin

rainomi

Revaan – Holy Paladin

revaan

Rostam – Holy Priest

rostam 

Shadowjoker – Holy Priest

shadowjoker

Sinea – Priest

Sinea

 

Arilyn – Holy Priest (How many raid frames do you NEED?!)

Arilyn

Asadachi – Holy Paladin

asadachi

Beneficience – Holy Priest

Beneficence

Brique – Holy Paladin

Brique

Cathe – Holy Paladin

Cathe 

Daedhir – Discipline Priest

Daedhir

10 Questions for Monday

by

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately. There’s a lot of questions that are churning through my brain and it can be overwhelming at times. Sometimes it helps for me to get it down on digital paper so I can sort through my thoughts.

  • Why do I have an easier time writing stuff for free as opposed to being paid?
  • How many players do you have in your guild that are capable of tanking but aren’t necessarily in tank positions? (As in have the gear, and the skills but their primary is DPS or healing)
  • Is your guild vent dirty? As in rated R+?
  • Are there certain types of people you don’t want to raid with? Why is that?
  • Do teachers make great raiders?
  • How do you group your healers in raids? Staggered or most of them in one group?
  • At what point do you say enough is enough and pull a trigger on a deal to add another player to the guild knowing it has the potential to cost you two in the process? Especially when one player hasn’t shown up in recent weeks?
  • Why doesn’t the Orgrimmar Inscription trainer’s store not have a name?
  • What to do for lunch? Foot long tuna sub or foot long turkey sub?
  • One more: Why do I have problems counting? 🙁

Want More to Read? Try Google Reader’s Bundles

by

g-bundle

Google Reader comes with subscriptions for many different topics on the internet. These are called bundles. These bundles can contain a varying amount of feeds from blogs related to that topic. It’s useful if you want to find a set of blogs to help fill up your reader but you don’t happen to know which blogs are good (or blogs that even exist!). Bundles tend to provide a nice place to start.

In Google Reader, click Browse for stuff on the left pane (highlighted above). At the top you will see Recommendations and Browse. Click the Browse tab. Then click Browse all bundles. There you can subscribe to packages that happen to catch your interest!

If your curious about what bundles I subscribe to:

  • Branding
  • Copywriting
  • Blogging
  • Freelance
  • Hockey
  • Journals (Yeah, the academic kind)
  • Leadership
  • Legal
  • Marketing
  • Psychology
  • Usability
  • Web Design
  • WordPress
  • World of Warcraft
  • Writing

It didn’t actually hit home until I saw it. It turns out my blog is liked by Google enough to be included with their “bundle” for World of Warcraft.

What on earth were they thinking?

I remember Lassirra mentioning this to me last month. Or the month before that. Fascinating! Speaking of which, she’s set up a new layout. Go check her out. The Hunter’s Mark has officially gone environmentally friendly.

To all you young bloggers out there, the key ingredient to blogging is a strong work ethic! Keep writing and success follows.

Get Rich or Heal Trying: How to Make Money via Dailies

by

king-mountain

This is a guest post by Sientina discussing earning gold in WoW as a healer.

I’m Sientina, and I heal things to death. You see that warrior over there? He’s been trying to kill me for the last 4 minutes and I’m healing away all his damage, waiting for help to arrive.  Sure, I could probably kill him… eventually, but I rolled a healing class for a reason. I don’t kill things. I don’t grind elementals for eternals. The thing is, raiding takes its toll. I have reagents to buy, armor to repair, and hair to cut when my old style isn’t working for me anymore. What’s a girl to do when she has money issues and no sugar daddy?

I could just heal the daily heroic for cash but if I don’t want to commit to a full heroic run, I can do a few dailies instead and still have the gold for the raid tonight. Besides, have you seen those dungeons? They need to fire their cleaning staff. I end up with more cobwebs in my hair then hair products, and I use a lot of hair products. For a style this good, there needs to be money rolling in. These dailies keep my hair free of cobwebs and my gear free of blood and gore.

Icecrown

Stop by your respective airships and pick these quests up.

Capture More Dispatches / Keeping the Alliance Blind – shoot down 6 scouts just west of Aldur’thar.
That’s Abominable! / That’s Abominable! – Kill an abom in the broken front for his guts and use your newly made Frankenstein creation to blow the undead to pieces.
The Solution Solution / Volatility – Loot some helms, armor, and bones and blow a Frostbrood Skytalon sky-high.
If you’ve unlocked enough quests to have the tabard of the Knights of the Ebon Blade, head to the Shadow Vault for 2 more dailies.
Vile Like Fire! – Grab a proto-drake and burn 8 buildings.  You can re-burn something already on fire, so it doesn’t matter how many others are around.
Shoot ‘Em Up – There are two buildings with harpoon launchers on the balcony. Pick a weapon and kill 15 drakes.  Make sure to grab group with anyone else at a harpoon, you’ll both be done sooner.
Both Alliance and Horde have their own assault point in Ymirhiem.  Join them to help their cause in a non-killing sort of fashion.  Horde, you’ll report to the northern edge while Alliance will be on the eastern side.
Assault by Air / Assault by Air – Grab the transport and hit the spear guns with the blinding shot to stay alive til all four of your infiltrators are dropped.
King of the Mountain / King of the Mountain – Jump up the mountain and plant the flag.  You can click for your next jump before you land so you can scale vertical walls with ease.

Sholazar Basin

For those Honored with Oracles:

Appeasing the Great Rain Stone – Hop around with your little green friend and look for sparklies on the ground.  After he digs them up, loot them.
Song of Fecundity – Go west to the Maker’s shelf and blow the horn around 8 piles of dirt.
Song of Reflection – Go to the top of each Pillar and use the digeridoo at each crystal.
For those Honored with Frenzyheart…
Chicken Party! – Click on 12 chickens or net big groups of them.  You don’t have to dismount to net or gather the chickens up, so catch them rodeo style.

Storm Peaks

You will have to unlock the Sons of Hodir quests to get these. Part of them are Sons of Hodir Dailies, and will give you rep towards your shoulder enchants.  Others are from Brunnhildar. Talk to Gretta the Arbiter to start them.

Thrusting Hodir’s Spear – Only available at Honored. Find a wyrm and slay him using the special cast bar.  Once you get the hang of killing the wyrm, it’ll take you about 5 minutes tops for 16 gold and 500 rep.
Everfrost – This isn’t a daily, but when you’re out and about and you see an everfrost chip, loot it.  Its a free 13 gold and then 7 gold for repeats.  You can do this as many times as you find chips and sometimes someone in general chat will be willing to pay you for the location of one.  If not… more rep for you.
Back to the Pit – Grab a warbear and beat 6 other bear-back riders in combat.
Maintaining Discipline – Beating slaves couldn’t be easier.  If they choose to fight back, you might have to kill one or two.

Grizzly Hills

The Alliance and Horde fight over the Blue Sky Logging Grounds.  Thankfully we can assist.

Pieces Parts / Making Repairs – Loot gears and springs off the ground.  The opposite factions npc’s won’t attack you, but enemy players might.
Life or Death / Overwhelmed! – Bandage 15 of your forces.
Shredder Repair / Shred the Alliance – Shredder time! Use the speed boost and get your machine out of there.  As a note, the keys you get from the quest reward will let you use shredders down in Venture Bay.

Dragonblight

Defending Wyrmrest Temple – Fly to the shrine, disable it and kill all opposing dragonflight in your way.  Simple? Yes… but you can up the ante by trying to complete Rapid Defense as well.

With dailies to keep this girl independent and her hair the best in Dalaran, I’m as carefree as bird. If you’re needing a break from that dreary old dungeon crawl, try a different way to get the gold you need.  Unless the main tank is cute and available. That’s a different situation.