All Stories

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

Your Winter Veil Gift, From Us

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Winterveil

Winter Veil’s a’comin! The nights are closing in, the frost’s creeping over the tavern windows and yetis are Icehowl’ing in the snowy fields. It’s a magical time of year that we’d like to celebrate alongside you folks – what better time than to give you a gift? That gift is – a chat by the fireside with each of us. But we need your help to do it.

What we want from you is a topic of conversation. We want you to nominate a different topic to write on for each of us – that is, Matt, Wynthea, Lodur, Thespius and me, Mimetir (Syd is still AWOL being happy and busy, I believe). The topic can be anything at all you like – whatever you want that writer’s thoughts on. WoW related things are a good start for a WoW blog obviously, but as it’s Winter Veil – if you want us to write on something else, we might just do it.

You have until Monday 14th to reply to this article with your topic nominations for each writer. Of course we can’t write on every topic you guys nominate because if we try that we’ll miss Winter Veil ourselves! So once the five-day nomination time is over, Matt will make a list of the collected nominations for each WoM writer and make a secret santa roll to decide which topic we each write on. We’ll each then write an article on our individual topic, given by one of you, and post it up during the holidays.

Sound complicated? Sure, it does a bit. I’m a bird brain trying to explain something, been at the eggnog too much and all that. I’ll give you an example to clear things up.

  • Say six of you nominate different topics for Lodur to write on. That makes six potential topics for Lodur’s Winter Veil-time article
  • Matt takes a 1-6 list of those topics, ordered by when they chronologically appear in the comments on the article
  • He then does an independently adjudicated ‘Lodur roll (/roll 1-6)’ to decide which topic Lodur writes on (this does of course mean that RNG might decide it’s not your topic’s turn this year – but it might decide it is)
  • He does the same for the other four writers – me, Thespius, Wynthea and himself  – and announces the winning topics, along with details of when the articles will go up

Then you watch out over the holidays to read articles on the selection of topics you wanted to hear our deepest thoughts on. You then respond with what you think about your topic and our thoughts. Win.

So how about it? Help us give you something this Winter Veil. What do you want to talk about?

How Our Guild is Handling Primordial Saronite

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3-3-spills

Primordial Saronite is the item that’s required for the next level of crafting gear out of Icecrown. There’s all sorts of methods of picking up this stuff and our leadership’s been hard at work figuring out what our approach should be. There’s a few things that are high on the priority list.

Shadowmourne, for one, requires over 20 of these. While going for another Legendary isn’t required, it makes a statement about the guild (not one but TWO Legendaries after all).

Our tanks can get an early boost to their gear and not have to rely on random drops from the different bosses. The better those guys get, the easier time we’ll have moving forward.

As we’re packing a number of sharpshooters in the raid (4 hunters), they’re also going to need some heavy artillery. The recipes for bullets and arrows will cost one Primordial Saronite to learn.

There’s lots of different ways we can go about spending Primordial Saronite to maximize raider utility.

Our approach

In a recent thread on the WoW forums, Ghostcrawler was clarifying a question regarding Shadowmourne. At the same time, he wanted to know this:

We’re also interested to see how various groups handle the Primordial Saronite issue. We designed it so there isn’t necessarily a right way to handle the material and we don’t want to over-prescribe your social dynamics anyway.

I found out over the weekend that Blizzard devs do read this blog. Wyn and Lodur kept bugging me and insisting that they did, but I remained a disbeliever until one of their guys pinged me on Twitter about it. That was too cool!

So here’s our answer:

Prioritizing Saronite to the tanks – Our tanks will get first crack at the Primordial Saronite that they need. The better their gear gets earlier on, the easier time we’ll have heading into Icecrown. I think they’re shooting for the boots first, but I can’t be sure of that yet. I’ve created a queue list on the forums where the tanks put down what they need (not necessarily what they want). I’m not sure how the legs are. If they beat the tier legs, then I’ll devote more Saronite to it. Until then, the queue list is just for the tanks and once they have all that is requied, the list will be opened up to the rest of the guild.

Ammo recipes – This is another one for us but it won’t happen until later on. Not only do you need the Saronite, the engineers need the reputation to purchase the recipe. It’s Goblin and Gnomish right? One crafts bullets and the other does arrows? Once our engineers have the requisite reputation, we’ll send one their way as well.

Shadowmourne – The Shadowmourne quest line is fairly extensive. The last step involves taking down Sindragosa which isn’t going to be anytime soon. Not only that, you have to perform a variety of tasks at different bosses (like standing in fires while surviving for a prolonged period of time). This step can wait a little longer before we invest.

On the other hand, there is some speculation that you need to be on the opening quests before you get the Shadowfrost Shards from the bosses. We don’t know how often the drops are and there is no confirmation.

Getting saronite

To that end, we’ve decided to increase the chances we have of obtaining Saronite. Sundays have been opened up for a new alt raid. We’ve been doing this for a while now, but we’ve decided to lay down some ground rules for it.

Why an alt raid?

For one, there’s many players with nothing to do on Sunday nights. We could either jump on our alts and join a pug with a 50-50 shot of succeeding, or organize our own with a higher chance of it working out. We like having multiple geared characters!

Our alts are almost as geared as our mains and it gives us a nice “break” from our normal duties that we have to do on our main characters. It’s nice for me to randomly destroy stuff on my Ret Paladin or my Elemental Shaman.

As I said earlier, extra Primordial Saronite is a plus. We can channel the results of those into the main raid. Not only that, since they’re alts, the players that are comfortable with it can spend their Emblems of Frost that they have to purchase Saronite for their mains if they need to.

Our main raids are overstaffed. We do this in order to ensure that we have enough players to raid. This inevitably means that some players are going to sit out during the week.  I don’t want them to fall too far behind us in gear. So any main raiders that don’t get to come in during the week are able to come in on Sunday in order to use up their lockout period. At the very least, they’ll get some Emblems.

We’re still working out loot systems for the time being. Last Sunday, when we walked into ToC 25, we had 23 alts in total. The other 2 were friends of the guild. The one thing that we’re lacking is another tank for our alt runs. If we can field a full crew for 25, then I can definitely apply loot council rules and prioritize main readers who need loot and balance it with the alts.

If you’re a tank out there with nothing to do on a Sunday night, come and check us out. Of course, anyone who feels that they are exceptional healers and DPS are welcome to apply regardless.

Let’s take down Arthas and move on to Deathwing already!

Healing Lord Marrowgar

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I stayed up late last night assembling a quick healer’s guide to Lord Marrowgar. You can find it over on WoW.com. Today’s going to be a very busy day for many guilds as they’ll be coming out of temporary retirement.

Remember, you have a multitude of options today:

  • Assault Icecrown on 25 man
  • Assault Icecrown in multiple teams of 10
  • Grab the weekly raid quest

If ICC is deemed too unstable, we’re going to fall back to options 2 or 3. Happy patch day!

Matt’s Guest Post Appearances: Part 1

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Last week, I made a limited time offer  to write a guest for any blogger who was interested. I’ve been hard at work since then and it’s been such a surreal experience. My main intent was to give myself a jumpstart and to help give back to the community.

When I was working on guest posts, there’s a few things that needed to be done. The first step is to analyze the blog and the comments in order to get a feel for what kind of readers that will be on there. I tried to tailor the post towards the audience of the site. The people that read Larisa’s Pink Pig Tail Inn are going to be vastly different than the people who read Zemalf’s Trek in the Blogosphere.

The thing when writing for other people, no matter who they are or what their blog size, is that you really want to put your best work forward. It’s like going to a friend’s house for dinner. You want to look presentable. Comb your hair (add a bit of gel, if you’re me). Dress nice. Be courteous because they’re the host and you don’t want to offend them. Find different ways to spice up your post. Write it as if it was going to be the last post you’d ever do and you wanted to go out with a bang.

Of course, if you really want to go the distance, you look up their code and find out what the width of their site is and send them pre-sized images without having to ask in advance thereby saving them the trouble of doing any cropping work. Look up what their commonly used headers are within posts and use those accordingly.

Anyway, here’s what I have so far.

Don’t worry, there’s still more to come. I do intend on honoring my commitments and I will make sure I get those posts out to you (those that made a request) by the end of the month.<

Priest Vacancy on WoW.com for Spiritual Guidance

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I figured I’d take the time here and now to clear the air.

When I was asked to take the position a year and some months ago, I felt I was the right person for the job and could do what they asked me to do. Some time later on, they were discussing the notion of reactivating Raid Rx (a column specifically about healing in raids). My workload had essentially doubled. Now the players that have read and followed along with my blog know that I am always going to be a team player. It doesn’t matter if it’s work related or gaming related. If I don’t think someone’s the right person for the job in a raid, I’ll ask them to step out for someone who I think can do better.

Hell, I voluntarily stepped out of healing a Tribute to Insanity run this week because I didn’t think I could pull it off without more time and practice.

With regards to Spiritual Guidance though, I was getting to the point where I was questioning my own work. In short, I didn’t think I could uphold the quality and content demands that the site – nay, the readers deserved. It’s difficult to come up with new and unique ideas on a weekly basis. Writing for WoW.com came with an added sense of pressure for me because I was always questioning my work and it’s relevance (you should see my recycle bin with all the crumpled papers and rejected ideas).

The problem is compounded further when the Priest writer isn’t as well versed in PvP or Shadow.

In short, I ran out of steam and I notified the editors before of this.

It’s time for someone else to come in and breathe new life to the column. I know the successor will do a better job then I. They’ll be joining a great crew of writers and personalities. I won’t be leaving as I’m still continuing Raid Rx along with other news stuff as it comes. This does help free up more time for me to work on other projects. Some players seem to forget that:

  • I’m in University (and it’s finaaaaalllls)
  • I run a guild
  • I’m writing a book
  • I write for 3 blogs
  • I’m revamping Plusheal.com

Of course, Modern Warfare 2 and Dragon Age might play an impact in there somewhere as well.

By the way, if you’re one of the many people that are applying for the position, feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions. I’m more than willing to set aside some time to have a quick chat about what to expect and other details.

But uh, do me a favour? Could you pull a Kanye on the new guy when he gets in? *wink*