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Updates about the world or the blog at large.

Player’s Choice Raid: Your 5 Picks?

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Let’s fast forward a few years. The 10th anniversary of World of Warcraft is about to hit. To celebrate 10 years of WoW, Blizzard has decided to create an instance filled with 5 bosses of your choice that have their stats and levels modified to whatever the current levels are. It’s a Trial of the Crusader style of an instance. You’re locked in a large arena with no way out.

It’s you, your friends, and your wits.

You get to pick any 5 bosses from any raid instance or outdoor raid boss in the history of the game.

My picks (Trial of the Insane)

  1. Mimiron
  2. Archimonde
  3. Nefarian 1.0
  4. Professor Putricide
  5. Kil’Jaeden

Mimiron’s been a favourite of mine. It’s like 3 mini bosses in one who then Voltron into a combined beast at the end.

Archie’s a huge headache. It took me a long time to get him down and is one of the most satisfactory kills I’ve ever picked up as a raider.

I’m interested in seeing what a post MoP Nef 1.0 encounter would look like. He gets a refresh and picks out abilities based on class (and maybe spec) during his phase 2. In a way, you get to pick your poison against him based on the lineup your raid brings.

Good news everyone! You get to pass plague around all over again in the level 100 version of the raid against Professor Putricide! Is your raid organized enough to automatically divvy themselves up based on which colour debuff they receive? Do they know who is dirty and who is clean?

Lastly, Kil’Jaeden. The boss I’ve worked on the longest in my entire raiding career. Heroic Zon’ozz was close but came up short. Learning to utilize the pet dragon, the positioning, handling all the incoming abilities was like a symphony coming together and making pitch perfect music.

What about you? Which 5 bosses would make it on your Player’s Choice list?

Help! Need Your Resources and Links!

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I’ve been asked by my overlords to compile a large list of resources and links for WoW players. The internet is just too damn large. There’s new blogs starting everyday and sites being abandoned or taken down almost weekly. It’s a little bit much even for me.

So I’m requesting reinforcements!

Blogs.  These are typically sorted by class. But I know there’s a few that write about more than one class. For example, although Restokin closely identifies with druids of the resto and balance variety, there’s some advice on other classes. The stipulation though is that the blog must continue to be active and predominantly about WoW. Last updated 2011 doesn’t count. I won’t care if there’s stuff about the occasional League of Legends frustrations but it’s meant to be list of WoW resources. Even non-class specific stuff for gold and transmog would be welcome as I don’t know much about those either.

Strategy sites. Sites like Learn 2 Raid, Icy Veins, and Tankspot would fit nicely here. I’m sure there’s others out there.

Podcasts. I don’t listen to any podcasts at all. I’ve never gotten used to that medium. I like being able to read, scan, and skim. Can’t really do that with podcasts and I find that I have to listen to a bunch of stuff I have no interest in (such as hunter changes) before we get to the good stuff (raid and healing). However, if you have any favourites, please send them my way.

General news. This one’s more or less locked down. MMO Champion, WoWHead news, and Curse are the big ones.

Others. Character development tools are cool (WoW Reforge, Ask Mr Robot). General recruiting sites or forums. Guild tools. Basically anything that’s WoW related that might not fit other sections. I can create a second category for them.

Anyway, I’d greatly appreciate any resources you can provide. Feel free to comment below or email me as well.

[VIDEO] Mists Beta: Videos from the Vault of Mysteries

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Managed to queue into the second half of Mogu’shan Vaults on beta this week really late at night. I figured while these attempts were still fresh on my mine, I could at least get some pointers and notes down along with the recorded video. Apologies for the 720p. I found out that my bottleneck’s my video card (GTX 460, looking to get a 670 later on).

Didn’t actually take down Will of the Emperor. Got to within 2% left before the raid buckled. It’s fairly repetitive and you get the idea of what’s going on. I’ll keep making notes and additions with any changes or insights I get later on as we get into the expansion itself.

My favourite encounter by far is the Spirit Kings. Just so much going on with both covering the raid and making sure you don’t get screwed by specific player abilities. Elegon’s a visual beauty, too.

I’ll get the first half of Mogu’shan Vaults up in a few days. If you can’t wait, you can see them on my Youtube channel.

5 Year Blogiversary (And beta keys for you)

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EDIT: Sorry folks, keys have been distributed out. Thanks for your feedback and thoughts!

Technically, the 5th year anniversary of the blog is tomorrow. In previous years, I’ve always wanted to offer something back to the community as a way of saying thanks for sticking around and your support. This year, I actually do have something I can hand out.

10 Mists of Pandaria beta keys

I know it’s late, but that’s why I wanted to get this post out a little early to maximize time. If you’re interested in a key, drop me a comment here or email me (Contact form at the top).

Tell me what part of the expansion you’re looking forward to and what topics you’re interested in reading about from Joe or myself.

Do me a favour, and double check your email. If you’re on Twitter, put your username there so I can reach you that way as well. I’ll pick get in touch with winners sometime tomorrow morning.

After you’re done with your response, I highly recommend you visit TwizzCast and give my buddy Twizz’s podcast a listen. A public thank you from me to him is in order as without him, I wouldn’t have any keys to give away.

Five years. That’s a long time. That’s 5 years of me keeping you occupied during your coffee breaks at work (or just your work in general). I feel bad for slowing down your productivity :(. But really, thank you to everyone for reading the posts here, sharing your perspectives, and being awesome in general.

I deem you all honorary bros.

P.S., If you haven’t stopped by my Youtube channel recently, I’ve uploaded 3 MoP raiding videos from Mogu’shan Vaults in LFR if you’re interested in seeing what you’ll be up against. You’ll be able to see examples of me standing in bad stuff while wrestling with text messages from one of my Resto Druids Disappointed smile. Not intentional, I promise.

Question: Guild A or Guild B?

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I am a terrible blogger and lost the link to this self post on r/wow. But, I thought it was a good question since there’s bound to have been other players in similar situations.

So I have been faced with a problem and thought I should ask for some advice.

Since the start of cataclysm I have raided with a guild that was fairly progression drived (downing final bosses in a raid before next patch and even working on progression). When DS hit, we hit the ground running. After 4 months or so of raiding we got our rogue his legendarys and then the group kinda fell apart. I wasn’t ready to be done with raiding just yet so I pugged a lot for 8 weeks or so and got my tauren holy pally well geared. Enough so that I found a new guild that was still doing heroic progression and joined them. Now after 3 weeks in this new guild, my old guild decided to start running again. I plan on raiding with them come MoP, so they want me to bring my pally back and continue progression. But I don’t want to leave the guild I just joined without a healer. I have a disc priest in the old guild that I have been healing with, but it makes our comp less than optimal. Any suggestions on what I should do?

My initial thinking is to analyze why the first group ceased running. Depending on the reasoning, it could happen again and you might find yourself hung out to try. If it’s due to players losing interest or the leadership losing interest, you’d better be careful because there’s a chance that it’ll happen. One common trend I notice about certain players is that their interest level is up there when it comes to raiding content, but once they hit a progression wall (or if they’ve beaten the progression wall), they’ll stop showing up and lose interest until the next content patch. Repeat that for the next tier.

I personally hate people like that.

You end up equipping them so that they become an asset and then they take their leave costing you time to train up and gear a replacement. Call ’em yo-yo players.

But I’m digressing.

If you don’t think  they’re going to lose interest or anything like that, then by all means resume progression since it seems like you’ve had the most fun. If you can’t say for certain that they’re not going to bail out on you, then I’d stick with the second group since it seems that they’re a little more stable and established.

Secret option C? You could double dip and play both your Priest and your Paladin, but you might find yourself burning out twice as fast and reducing your overall effectiveness to both groups. But, that largely depends on your gaming stamina and interest levels anyway.

Have any of you been in a situation akin to this fine fellow? What did you end up doing and how did it turn out? What would you suggest that this person do?