All Stories

Every story, article, column, piece, and so forth on World of Matticus ever published.

Of All the Things to Complain About, Portals?

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Mages are making a killing right now selling portals. Some are doing it for free or for tips thus keeping the cost of transportation low on my Ner’zhul. Usually about 5 – 10g will get you anywhere.

What’s really annoying me right now is the player base that’s complaining about the lack of portals in the sanctuary cities. Some have publically threatened to quit the game and cancel their subscriptions over it. Makes me wonder if that’s the same population base that feels entitled to get gear and achievements without actually doing anything.

Hands up

Remember when mounts were expensive, not the training?
Remember when the first mount wasn’t obtainable until level 40?
Remember when using taxis were considerably longer?
Remember when you had to manually select each destination whenever you got to the next flight point? (Yes, they were unconnected back then)

My point is, traveling is really easy now compared to where it’s been over the past six years (holy crap, six years?). In less then 2 weeks, we gain the ability to fly ANYWHERE we want in the game (exception, Vash’jir, where we can swim on a sea pony).

I believe class trainers and auction house capabilities have been added to help facilitate the levelling process in those expansion zones. But I don’t know, the old world just became the new world and if a player really wants to quit the game over lack of portals, who am I to stop them? Less competition for mobs and drops anyway.

TANGENT: Six years?!

Goodbye Old World

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It’s time you evolved. It’s going to cause a bit of pain from the slight scarring, but it will be for the better. One of my fondest memories of going through the old world is the constant world PvP action between Southshore and Tarren Mill. It finally appears that battle has been decided. The Horde have emerged victorious. Of course, not to be out done, Alliance forces pressed into southern Barrens and laid siege to Camp Taurajo. Blackrock Mountain will soon erupt with a flurry of activity from both sides. I remember on one of the previous servers, there was a guild called the <Blackrock Mountain Police>. As you can guess, all they did was clear out the place of any Horde players.

I ran Zul’Gurub one last time and I got shut out. Raptor gave me nothing and I couldn’t take down the Tiger boss.

Memories

  • I remember waiting what felt like five years for that stupid Defias Messenger.
  • I remember AFK running looking for Mankirk’s wife during my (brief) time as a Horde player.
  • I remember that insane run from Auberdine all the way down to Ashenvale and then on to the Zoram Strand for Blackfathom Deeps.
  • I remember how desolate Desloace truly was.
  • I remember all those chicken robot escort quests found in Feralas, Tanaris and the Hinterlands.
  • I remember grinding off buzzards, scorpions and basilisks out in Blasted Lands during that dreaded lower 50s bracket.
  • I remember a zone called Alterac Mountains.
  • I remember doing that Legend of Stalvan quest and wondering who the heck was this guy and would he one day end up being a raid boss (nope).
  • I remember doing the long Onyxia attunement quest chain (Respect to the Horde players who did theirs).
  • Yeah, it won’t be the same.

What’s the one favourite memory you have of the old world?

Leetsauced

Another podcast appearance by me. This time, it wasn’t Matt the blogger or Matt the healer. It was produced from the standpoint of Matt the GM. I spoke about how Conquest came to fruition, some of the tough decisions that had to be made and the rewards of being a GM. I also offered a bit of advice to players who do not feel content in their guilds and believe they can do a better job by striking out on their own. This is a good a time as any.

And finally, you get the full story of how Matt’s raiding iron man streak got ruined by his Wii (actually, I probably lost the Iron Man streak a long time ago).

Just a heads up that the content on the podcast is considered NSFW (some explicit language).

Can’t wait for it? Here’s a brief teaser.

Full episode will be released tomorrow evening (November 23).

New class combinations?

Anyone plan on rolling any new alts? I think I’ll probably set up a Night Elf Mage. And I know some of you are curious, but this priest will remain a dwarf not a gnome.

Healing Through the Burst Damage

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Some people call it spike damage.

Others call it burst damage.

Whatever you want to call it, this attack does a ridiculous amount of damage within a short time frame and coordinated healing is going to be required to counter it. It’s one of the basic attacks any boss will throw against your party and yet when I join pickup raids, these attacks are enough to drop most tanks. Either they forget to use their survival cooldowns or their healers forget to burst heal them.

Why don’t we look at some burst damage examples just so you get an idea?

Instant, high damage attacks

Flame Breath – Halion
Shadow Breath – Sartharion
Fusion Punch – Iron Council

What these types of attacks have in common is that they have the capability to 1-shot your tank if their health is too low. They’re fairly quick and you might not have enough time to prepare for it. In the case of the dragons, you need to rely on a visual cue with regards to the way they tilt their head up.

How to counter it: Your tank healers should always keep a HoT up on them at all times. Don’t even worry about over healing at 85. There is always going to be incoming damage and their health isn’t likely to stay at 100% for most of the fight anyway. Expect your tank to hover around the 70-90% range. Use whatever visual cues you have to your advantage. Expect to work with the tanks on this one if you’ve been wiping to it for most of the night. Have a survival cooldown ready for each application. Each healer or tank or DPS with a cooldown needs to know where they are in the list. It helps to have a leader bark out which player’s cooldown is next.

Individually, you’ll want to try to time your 2.5 second long big heal to coincide when the attack lands. It takes a bit of practice, but it’s doable. Eventually, after multiple tries and attempts on a boss, you’ll get a handle for the rhythm.

Channeled, high damage over a period of time

Plasma Blast – Mimiron
Frost Blast – Kel’Thuzad
Harvest Soul – Lich King

These types of attacks last over a period of a few seconds. The Frost Blast ability does 104% of a player’s health in seconds. Sometimes, there is no warning on these either. The initial tick or two will usually go off and your healers have 1 second to find out who the affected player is, 1 second to target and start the cast, and another second for the heal to land. By the 4th second, that player is usually dead.

How to counter it: First thing you want to do is make sure that the boss ability shows up as a high priority debuff on your raid frames. This way, you can use your peripheral vision and quickly determine which player is afflicted. This is where HPS actually matters. That boss is going to do an X amount of damage to your tank in a span of a few seconds. If you can hold off and mitigate or heal through the damage, you are golden. The trick with these? Sometimes it isn’t possible for 1 healer to do it on their own. The incoming damage is either too much or the healer’s spellpower and other stats aren’t high enough to counteract it. This is when your healing team needs to plan this out ahead of time and have 2-3 healers automatically focus the tank when that boss ability is used.

In one of the future encounters, the Omnichron Defense System has an boss where they will spend about 3 seconds targeting a player with a laser. After the 3 seconds are up, it shoots a huge jet of sustained fire at that player. I had a tough time tackling it on 10 man and it put a huge dent in my mana reserves.

Being able to counter these various forms of burst damage is going to be a key skill for your team of healers. It doesn’t hurt to practice or at least visualize how you intend to go about it.

Now the question is, how does your class deal with spike damage? Remember it doesn’t necessarily apply to just raids. There are going to be 5 man encounters where the only healer you have to rely on is yourself to keep that tank alive. You don’t need to keep players topped off. You just need their health bars to be somewhat filled. Topping off can always be done after the fact.

Bored? Try Lore!

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We’ve still got a pain-stakingly long two weeks (roughly) until Cataclysm drops. 4.0.3a will bring a wealth of opportunities to see the new zones and play with the race/combo changes, but how else is your time being spent?  Here’s what I’ve seen a lot of in Trade Chat:

Player1: What’s going on in SW?

Player2: Pre-Cata Event

Player1: What do you do for it?

Player3: It’s 5 quests and that’s it.

Player1: What do you get for it?

Player4: Nothing.

Player1: Lame.

Now that the new Elemental Invasion is underway, I saw a lot of this:

Player1: What’s going on in IF?

Player2: Elemental Invasion for Pre-Cata

Player1: Grr… I can’t do anything here right now.

Player3: You have to kill the elementals and rescue civilians.

Player1: What do I get for it?

Player4: ilevel 251 epics from some dungeons.

Player1: Awesome!

I gotta say, this makes me sad. I’m well aware of the addictive nature of seeing a shiny new purple epic show up in your inventory, but the complete shunning of anything potentially entertaining in the game baffles me. Of course, not everyone is going to like every little nuance in the game. Blizzard has tried to do a thorough job of making the game diverse enough for everyone. In the 4 years I’ve been playing WoW, I think they’ve done a bang-up job, too.

Give your eyes some exercise!

I’ll be the first to admit that throughout most of my WoW career I read only the objectives, then looked to QuestHelper (or the new WoW version) to guide me on my way. I paid no attention to the text or lore of the quests.

Wrath of the Lich King changed that for me. In Burning Crusade, I didn’t have any passion to see Illidan dead. Yeah, I knew he was the last boss, but I didn’t harbour a pure hatred for him. Arthas was a different story. The way we saw Arthas throughout this latest expansion instilled a desire to annihilate him when Icecrown Citadel was opened. We got to play as him, we were taunted by him, and we were at times aligned with him. In short, we became invested in the story and its outcome.

When Cataclysm was announced, I immediately started to thirst for knowledge. Who was Deathwing? How did he get to be so horrible? Why is he so mad? What other forces might we fight against? My first homework was to check out WoWpedia for an overview. It gave me a decent amount, but not enough. I then decided to go to the books. Christie Golden’s The Shattering is a quick and easy read. I tore through it in a day. There are other books that give you more history on Deathwing and the Dragon/Demon Soul, and it’s on my nightstand as I write this.

Also, I took the time to read the quests in the pre-Cataclysm event. Following the Doomsayers, visiting the Twilight Hammer’s camp, seeing the image of Cho’gall, all driving me further towards my passion of seeing Deathwing dead. Not for “epic lewtz”, but just to see the antagonist dead.

What can I do to get involved?

  • Take time to read the quests. They’re 2 paragraphs at most, and take no more than 30 seconds to read.
  • Check out WoWpedia. Search for Deathwing and get “click-happy”. I found myself on so many different wikis learning about the characters we’re spending the next ~2 years with. (The combination of Thrall and Magni Bronzebeard made me decide to race change my Shaman to Dwarf)
  • Read some of the novels! Across the board, people have recommended Lord of the Clans as a great place to start. From there, if you’re gearing up for Cataclysm, read The Shattering right after. Both are quick reads and really enjoyable (though I have issues with some of Golden’s writing choices).

Think of it this way: Why do people get so involved in movies and TV shows? It’s because we get invested in them. We learn to love the protagonists and hate that antagonists. Maybe it’s the other way around! Either way, you become attached to the characters in the story. The same exists with video games. Some of the best video games out there have compelling storylines with deep characters. WoW, in my opinion, is no different. I look at my playtime as “living through a story.”

I know that in Cataclysm, I’ll be trying to get my main up as fast as possible, while using an alt to actually read the quests along the way. I want Deathwing’s head on a platter, including his metal chinny-CHIN-CHIN!!

Special Delivery: Roundup Of This Week’s Best WoW Posts

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The Shattering! This Tuesday?! Is it happening? Isn’t it happening? Is the World As We Know It Going To Go Kaboom? Maybe.  One thing’s for sure: Azeroth’s not going to be the ideal holiday spot with balmy breezes and clear sea views for much longer. Unless you count the whoosh of dragon wings above you and the view of a tidal wave coming right for you as you lounge on the beach polishing your tier kit. Not that you would be, of course, because you like everyone in the blogosphere are getting ready for the Big Changes whenever they happen. Right? Right.

After its lolloping back and forth between various topics over the past few weeks the blogosphere seems to have settled firmly on looking at healing. Well, I say firmly, but there’s the odd look at guilds in Cataclysm, too. Generally things are hotting up in the blogosphere as we get ready for lava to ruin our holiday locations. So as an aside from my normal task of finding the best blog posts and delivering them over at MMO Melting Pot, I’ve gone and dredged the blogosphere for the week’s bset on healing, leading and guilds for you here at WoM. And this week there really should be something for everyone. Except possibly trees.. wait, resto druids, no permanent tree forms, what do we call you guys now?

 

  • T-Minus-3 Weeks: The State Of The Resto Shaman: Vixsin over at Life In Group 5 has a timely preview of what raiding resto shaman can expect to get out of their healing toolkit come the time to raid. She=’s looking at all of our healing spells, old new and tweaked, and how effective they’re looking after the latest beta changes. She’s also looking at how they interact with our stats and has some in-depth but digestible explanations on how much Mastery affects various spells. Very well written, and also an encouraging post for resto-shaman kind. Almost makes me wish I was staying a resto shaman for raiding!
  • Five Tips For Holy Paladin Healing In 4.0.1: Kurn’s got some practical tips for any holy paladins still getting on with the business of healing here and now, Cataclysm malarky aside. The tips are well written and look to be good advice – she’s got thoughts on how and whom to beacon, whether Flash of Light is any good, and the importance of Divine Pea. Sorry, Plea. She’s also got a tip and video clip specifically aimed at dealing with Infest if you’re still visiting Arthas regularly. She does have the caveat that these tips might not be as useful in 4.0.3, but they are probably worth a read as somewhere between food for thought and a discussion point for you Holy pallies.
  • Cataclysm Enchants For Holy Priests: Oestrus has a two part guide that does just what it says on the tin. You can find part 1 here and part 2 in the link at the start. It’s a no brass-buttons guide which gives you just what you need; she goes through all of the equipment slots and gives you the run down on which enchants she thinks will suit a priest best to go do their holy thing. Of course, nothing’s set in stone yet and things may change come the time we all get to 85 but Oestrus’ guide looks well researched and thought out, and should let you know what to be aiming for. Some of the new enchants are really creatively named, too.
  • The healing model in Cataclysm: pwnwear has highlighted a post on their forums by Adrift, one of their readers. It’s a very cogent piece on the interaction between HPS, burst healing and desireable tank survivability with an undertone of awareness that mana will be at a premium. Adrift looks at the ways a tank might be geared – avoidance vs. stamina – and talks about how this might impact his healing, and then the same again for theoretical raid damage. He also takes a look at what stats healers are likely to prioritize both earlier and later in Cataclysm raiding content. I found this an absorbing read both from a healer and a tank’s perspective – would recommend reading it yourself then sharing it with your guild’s meatshields.
  • Tips for applying to a guild as we move towards Cataclysm: Moving guild, getting a fresh start. The thought might’ve crossed your mind. Rank4HealingTouch is one step ahead and has an excellent post guiding you through the major sections of a standard guild applications. The guide’s split up by sections and covers everything from the basics of spelling and checking to answering questions on your computer specs, your class, your role, and yourself. In each case as he goes through, he talks about how to answer the questions – and how not to. He also gives some examples for certain topics to get you thinking. Think of this guide as a kind of cheat sheet, if you will – I’d not recommend cheating and it doesn’t give you all the answers, but it is incredibly well written and good advice.

That’s it for this week. Have a happy Shattering! Oh, I might not be able to do one of these next weekend, so apologies if so – but I’ll quite possibly be gooey eyed at the local Christmas market full of pretty lights and sweet things. But should resume the following week, if so.

Til then, then! Oh, and by the way, what are you hoping to read more or less of, from around the blogosphere? And just what do we call trees now?