Matticus

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

Free T6 for Shamans

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Well, at least for Resto Shamans anyway. Some friends of mine were checking out some T6 gear and to their surprise, they discovered that the T6 Restoration gear required no tokens to purchase. Of course, you need to be attuned to Mt. Hyjal to be able to make the purchase. Elemental Shamans and Enhancement Shamans did not have this luxury. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots or anything to show you (I COULD photoshop it). Judging by the level of excitement in our chat channels, it sounded legitimate. Can anyone else make a confirmation?

Not that it matters. I expect this to get patched immediately.

The downside to it was that the armor could not be repaired. But who needs to pay repair bills when you get free gear anyway?

EDIT: Looks like server are being taken offline briefly tomorrow morning.

A Tuesday Story and Trash Blows

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I stumbled upon this touching story today. Everyone needs to go read it. Sometimes we all need a reminder to slow down just a little bit even in WoW.

Fate wrote a nice piece the other day about the hassles of trash mobs. One of his Guildies complained about them and Fate took it upon his hands to write about why trash is good and not bad. His main argument? Trash helps to build up the suspense and the pleasure when the boss in charge of them gets taken down. Otherwise, you’d be blowing through Karazhan, SSC, and TK within time frames of an hour.

Personally, I’d love to see more instances akin to Mag and Gruul (Ony style). We’re on a limited raiding schedule. Every wipe, every trash kill, every rebuff eats into the precious time we have. Our 25 mans are capped at exactly 11 hours of raiding per week. Let me first say that I’m proud of the Guild that I’m in and the discipline that they show during crunch time. We may fool around and crack jokes, but when we get down to business we do whatever it takes to get the job done. The clutch Al’ar kill is a testament to that (5 hours of sunday wiping, one more respawn kill, followed by an Al’ar first down). Sometimes, I just wish we had more time to do it.

Trash is nice to have sometimes. I do agree with Fate that it’s something to do in between bosses. Players need to have a little bit of a downtime. It’s not possible to ask 25 players to maintain a 110% focus and concentration. They would burn out too quickly. I know I can’t remain that tense for such a period of time.

But on the other hand, I don’t want to spend time to reclear trash repeatedly. Nothing kills momentum faster then getting a boss down to 10% and knowing you’re able to kill him only to get stopped by the Wall of Trash (0/*, Creature – Wall, Tap: Piss off target raid).

Ah M:TG. Sometimes I miss playing. But it’s either that or WoW.

Anyways, the trash respawns, you look at the time and you realize that your raid is over as people have to work or go to school on the east coast. Trash respawns just kills that level of energy and anticipation. With all the trash removed in SSC, we’d be able to one shot all the bosses and have time left over to do other things (Like Cartman says, now we can all enjoy the game)!

Fate’s point is excellent though. We DO need that trash. Where else are we going to get our Primal Nethers from? Or random BoE/BoP recipes?

Here’s a thought.

We’ve all sniggered at one point when our raid leader forgot to downgrade a raid instance from Heroic to Normal difficulty.

What if Blizzard implemented it and made Heroic raids? Give Raiders a choice in how they want to go through SSC. They can do it normally, or they can do it the Heroic way. Reduce trash by 80% but increase boss difficulty by 20%. Keep loot tables roughly the same and throw in some badges. Maybe the health of Hydross will increase a little bit so the raid needs to ice and poison dance for an extra minute. Think of it as an express raid. I’m not going to try and develop that concept any further. It would probably get defeated in a manner of minutes. But at least it’s something to think about. I sure as hell am not a game developer.

Sadly, I don’t get to go into Zul’Aman today. Our 25 schedules stay the same throughout. With the reset timer nearly twice as fast as Karazhan, it means we can do it any time we want. I’ll probably run through it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, snoozing through trash is the order of the day.

It’s Here

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Nothing debugs addons faster then a raid gone wrong. Don’t you love the feeling of raiding on patch day only to find out your raid frames aren’t working? Or your target of target’s target has disappeared? Or you don’t know when to jump in the water to avoid spout?

When 2.2 came out, Curse got flooded and was inaccessible for a while. I had to turn to WoW Ace to finish patching up the few dated addons I had remaining. This time, I’ve got the Curse Client ready to go. It’s served me well for the most part. It runs silently in the background and automatically updates addons when there are new versions on the site. You can either use that or WoW Ace updater (I think that’s what it’s called). They both essentially do the same thing. If you want to install a new addon from Curse, there’s a special link which prompts the Curse Client to install it for you without any intervention on your part.

Happy patch day! Expect instance servers to be flooded with everyone flocking to ZA.

Making Maiden Submit

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I was about to turn in, but I decided to check my email first (5th time today). I had an intriguing question directed at me that I could not resist answering.

Edit: Email partially edited for clarity and compactness.

Hey Matt

Guild went to Kara today, downed Attunmen (hurray – first all guild boss kill). Then we went on to the Maiden of Pwnsauce – though not really. Wiped 4 times. We had three healers. 2 hrs later came back to try, this time with 4 healers, one replacing the offtank. Wiped 3 times. I threw Adam Smith at the wall and almost broke my headset again, because I like to be constructive.

I know that you can’t tell what the problem is just by hearing that. The tank keeps dying. We have 4 healers – 3 of which are above 1000 healing, one that’s at a shameful 617 (I’m going to kick him next time I see him on his hunter :P). You’d figure with two pallies on tank,  druid on raid, me on dispell, we could do this no problem – but. the tank keeps dying.

The essentials of the maiden fight – Pally does blessing of sacrifice to heal through redemption. Everyone stands at beginning of steps. Someone dispells holy fire. Pew pew. Lootz. Move on.

I have no idea. I’m so frustrated. The only thing I can do on my end from what I see is attempt to dispell better – for some reason, there are a few people out of my range. I do gymnastics to no avail, in fact, get bitchslapped by Maiden’s consecrationishthing and have got to heal myself. People keep telling me that if i stand at the stairs, I should be just fine. But these… are lies… or I’m doing something wrong and I don’t know what.

First, I’d like to address something. Headset smashing is a common occurrence. I myself have broken three Plantronic’s Audio 90s and one Logitech PC Gaming Headset within the span of a year. Hell hath no fury like a gamer pissed. That’s why I dropped $90 on my Sennheiser PC Audio 160’s and I am loving them (The SK edition even). Knowing it’s price, I would not throw it against the wall.

Anyways, I digress. So here I have a reader who has some trouble dealing with the meddlesome Maiden of a woman. The main problem here is that the tank keeps dying. There are two probably causes: The tank can’t survive due to undergearedness or the healers are sitting around taking a smoke break. Either of those two are bad.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you’re utilizing a circular formation for the whole raid. Every ranged member (healer, caster, or hunter) should be in between each set of pillars. Your melee classes would be in the central platform in a triangular formation of some sort with some distance between each other.

Possible Solutions

When you engage Maiden, every ranged member should be collapsing to the first step. You need to be able to dispel the guy that’s directly opposite from you. I know this has nothing to do with keeping the tank alive, but bear with me for a moment. If you can hit the guy on the other side, then you’ll be able to reach everyone else around you. I like to bind my Dispel key to ‘e’.

I’m going to suggest a minor change in your setup in regards to your healing. Shift one of your Paladins from MT duty to raid duty. You, as the Priest, should be on the MT. Have that Paladin cleanse the raid when Holy Fire hits (it’s cheaper then your Dispel). You should not be close enough to Maiden to absorb her Consecrate damage. Your Raid should be close enough to Maiden so that everyone can dispel each other but far enough away that her Consecrate does not affect you. If your Paladin isn’t keeping up Blessing of Sacrifice, then somethings wrong. One Paladin should be able to keep up the tank during the Repentance period.  When Repentance hits, you’re just sitting there and counting down. It is all Paladin. Once you’re free, your tank might be fairly wounded. Shield him immediately, then toss a renew, and resume your healing duties. You didn’t specify which stage of the encounter that your MT is dying in, but it’s usually in the Repentance period. If you got another melee class, consider having Paladin 2 put a Blessing of Sacrifice on him to wake him up out of Repentance.

If there’s still problems, you’ll need to take it a step further and analyze the encounters further to discover what is causing the problem. There isn’t much of a gear check involved here but if your tank is undergeared, it is possible for him to get smashed quickly. I confess that it took my Karazhan Guild about 10 days to take her down.

With four healers, there should be no excuse for the tank to die at all. If you can, I highly recommend using WoW Web Stats to parse your Combat Log. If you’re unsure of how, Kirk’s got a great guide (I’m working on one to help supplement it). What you can do is use that tool to help analyze your encounters and find out exactly what is going wrong.

I hope that helps! Having problems healing a certain boss encounter? Feel free to drop me a line: matttz at gmail dot com.

No Money No Problem

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Can that patch get here any sooner? The faster I get to deal more damage, the faster I can start getting money. Leiandra made a good point the other day. Why on earth do we do daily quests? With all the raiding and the wiping on Vashj, I need income from some source to restock on potions. I need Mana Potions to survive and make sure the rest of my team lives. Here’s my main problem. It’s not the inability for me to deal damage. It’s my lack of time. There’s so many things that I need to do on a given day that I just don’t have the time to farm the necessary Herbs. Therefore, I’m caught flatfooted and placed at the mercy of the auction house minutes before the raid is due to begin. That is why I need the money from daily quests. I’m trading time for money.

During the summer, the gain from doing dailies outweighed the loss from repairs and pots. I was raking in about 100 G per day between Mallet and Saphfira. I was able to pick up an epic mount soon after. It went to Saphfira. Why not my main you ask? Because Saphfira’s professions are mining and herbalism whereas Mallet’s are enchanting and tailoring. It makes more sense. The time I do have to farm can then be increased further.

Now that I have one epic mount already, I just don’t have the desire to collect the gold needed for another one. I just don’t see the point. Prestige? Whoaness? No, I rely on my gear for that. Just about everyone has an epic or a netherdrake already. My income has been cut dramatically short. It’s now something like 20 gold per day. It’s barely enough to get me by on potions and repairs. My gold count tends to stay below 100 among both my characters. I guess I’d be considered impoverished in WoW?