*** SPOILER*** Missed Dungeons and Raids? Screenshots if You Want to See Them

Mark this post as read if you want to remain in the dark.

For every one else, I had the screenshots in my library for quite a while.

It’s no fun listening to audio streams and listening to “Oohs”, “Ahhs”, and applause without getting to see it.

Check out the last shot, too. I don’t know if anyone’s ever mentioned that yet before. I found it interesting.

So here’s a few shots of Eye of Eternity, Obsidian Sanctum, Halls of Lightning, and Storm Peaks

malygos-2malygos-1

Left: Here’s a shot of Malygos in his humble abode. The raid instance is literally a giant disc with Malygos flying around until you activate him. It’s a 3 phase encounter. I haven’t successfully completed him yet so I can’t offer much at this time.

Right: Me in my awesome attempt to try and do something. Alas, Malygos is overpowered and promptly kills us a matter of minutes.

os-2os-1

Left: This is a shot of Obsidian Sanctum. Here is a shot of the party engaging the mini-bosses.

Right: You’ll notice the phasing mechanic put in play. Even though it “looks” the same, I get thrown into a different dimension. Here, I have to kill that shifted drake along with the Rogue or else something bad happens. I don’t actually know what.

os-3os-4

Left: We’re taking on Sartharion. The guy hits like a pansy. For the raiders, take a good look at positioning in terms of tank, boss, and group. There’s a good reason for it.

Right: … Because every so often, a big wall of fire is going to rake the island that we’re on. Notice there’s a hole. Right when the wall warning occurs, the entire raid needs to ensure they’re in one of the two “safe zones” (on the left and on the right, by his tail, if you look carefully). If you eat the fire, you get knocked back and take a non-pansyish amount of damage.

uld-1uld-4

Left: One of the old guys, I think. Wouldn’t dare hit a Dwarven brotha’ from anotha’ motha’. But I don’t dare test out my hypothesis.

Right: Another shot of the exterior. Place looks b-e-a-utiful.

uld-5uld-6

Left: Interior shot of Halls of Lightning. See those Dwarves on the left? It’s the Terra Dwarva army, baby!

Right: The roving boss that was mentioned in the D & R panel is this guy. We decided to set him up in the corner. There’s me with the lightning debuff (Pro tip: When you get it, don’t move. Trust me.)

uld-7

Left: Lastly, check out this interesting shot. It’s right after a wipe and after I released spirit. When you died in Tempest Keep, you’d automatically res to full health and life outside. But if you die out in the Halls, you seem to res in spirit form while mounted on Ghostly Gryphon.

4 Key Guild Related Tasks to do Before Wrath Hits

Its Wrath Boarding time!

The Wrath plane has landed and passengers are boarding soon! Are you going to be taking it first class or taking the back seat in the economy section?

Veneretio wrote a hot post about dealing with the last few weeks before the new expansion hits and the game resets.

So what does Vene say is the most basic thing to keep in mind as time passes by? His number 1 is to continue to make goals for yourself. He admits that “a lot of what you get now [will be] replaced later”. I’m inclined to agree. Even the most equipped players will be hanging up their present armor and gear once they approach the upper level 70s.

For me, most of my hard work was done over the summer. My reputation has largely been grinded out. The last one was Sporregar (which I felt took forever, personally). I may not have enough gold to live and spend lavishly, it will be enough to function comfortably once raiding expeditions start up again. I’m not as invested in my alts as other players are. I level them and gear them to the point where I know I can switch healers if necessary for raids with different people. My Priest is my main and any fun stuff like Achievements and Titles go straight to him.

While Vene says to make goals, Matticus has another rule that’s more prominent:

Relax!

I’ve played this game hard for over 2 years with intermittent breaks. Realistically, the point at which we start raiding as a 25 man unit will not occur until the Christmas holiday arrives. This means that most raiders will be out of action due to Christmas and New Year parties. This pushes back our raiding until early January.

I don’t know about you, but I plan to take it easy as much as I can over the next few weeks. Outside of WoW, I have a few papers, several exams, and a presentation to deliver. The assignments are due within 3 weeks. The presentation is due 4 days after Wrath releases (and I want to finish constructing it first so I don’t have to over the weekend).

Now is the time to get all the real life stuff out of the way. Finish off your work projects. Get cracking on school essays. Bury yourself in the textbooks and take time away from the game where it doesn’t matter as much anyway. If you have goals to complete, then by all means, go ahead and try to get them done. But leave a bit of room for yourself if you’re a progression oriented player who wants to sky rocket to 80.

Revisit loot

Numerous guilds will be wiping their DKP systems and starting fresh. Take the time to examine your loot system. Find out what worked and what didn’t. What would you have changed differently? Try bringing it up as soon as you can. Work out any kinks or problems with the loot system so that you don’t have to do it later when it matters the most: In the middle of a raid.

Roster check

Examine your roster again. Try to ascertain who is likely to stay and who is likely to go. Find out if there’s any holes in there that need to be plugged. My guild has lost a Rogue already and we may lose a mage. We realize that we can always sift through and acquire replacements during the leveling process, its far better to find players now so that the guild can spend more time knowing about new players.

Promotions

Now is an excellent time for promotions. If anyone is stepping down or retiring from the game, its a good time to find players who have demonstrated veteran and leadership qualities to take their place. Raid leaders: Let others take over. See if anyone has expressed interest in doing so. Try to find alternative raid leaders to run your raids. It’s great to have alternate leaders in place in case your main guy needs to sit for a while. There are no less than 6 people in my guild who are qualified to run and lead raids.

One of my guild officers have stepped down and I’ve been promoted. If you do decide to promote someone, the most important thing you can do is outline their tasks. Tell them straight up front what they are expected to do. I signed a 2 month contract as an officer because I wasn’t sure if I was willing to do this long term. I’ve served in a leadership position before but I didn’t feel particularly effective at the time. In my case, I’m being asked to provide healer presence to officer chat and contribute to raid strategy. I also get a vote in what raid directions the guild should go in. I’ only agreed to do this on the interim. Between responsibilities with my blog, WoW Insider, and school I don’t know if this is a position where I can actually contribute to.

Wrap up loose ends! Get it done quick whether its real life related or in game related! Need a title? Hurry and join a group or form it on your own! Want to push reputation? Start soon before people stop running certain instances!

Quick leak: WoW Insider’s going to be doing a quick and comprehensive guide for the various classes when 3.0.2 becomes official. The brass wants us to outline major talents, and changes to the way we operate and other things of interest.

Help me out. I have to write something up by Sunday. I already wrote about healing at level 80. What would you like to know about Holy Priests at level 70 in regards to the new patch?

I plan on including stuff about:

  • Talent suggestions
  • Quick spell overviews
  • Game mechanics that affect us

Anything else you can think of?

Image credits: photos71

Bank of Matticus Goes Public

banking

Due to requests from certain Hunter bloggers, the Bank of Matticus Financial Group has decided to go public. As part of the public disclosure process, CEO Matticus Moneycus has decided to reveal various assets that the public needs to know if they wish to invest in this banking powerhouse. Matticus leads a syndicate of prominent WoW Investors who have entrusted him with their finances and assets.

Hydroponics

bank-1

This is but a fraction of the hydroponics sector of the Bank of Matticus. Herb specialists continue to acquire species of plants around the clock to invest in Inscription the moment it becomes available.

Consumables

bank-2

In a bid to stream line workers, over 1000 Gnomes were released with severance pay with the option to rehire within the next year. Simply put, there is too much supply of consumables and not enough demand for them.

Ore

bank-3

Efforts to equip the soon-to-arrive Death Knights are well under way. They’ve agreed to become Smithies in order to augment themselves. Here is a fraction of some of the Ore and Stone that’s been gradually accumulated.

Supplementary

bank-4

The supplementary portion of the bank has largely been liquidated or is still in the process of being liquidated. Epic gems have largely been sold as well as a significant number of normal gems. Food consumables still remain as do other high performance consumables.

You’ll notice the gold count looks unimpressive. There’s a good reason for that. Bank of Matticus finances are spread out through a network of Dwarven and Goblin banks. In the event of a security breach, it will not result in the complete loss and destruction of BMF. Rest assured, hard currency sits at the 5 digit level. But that information cannot be disclosed here for the time being. It’s a result of Enchanting mats and numerous amounts of cloth being liquidated. The fifth bank tab has been hidden as it contains sensitive items and materials. Negotiations are currently underway Ironforge International Bank of Commerce for rights and access to a 6th tab. This is expected to happen within a year as assets continue to accumulate.

Plan Your Raid with RaidComp!

raidcomp

MMO Champion’s released a great new tool for Guild and Raid Leaders alike! It’s called RaidComp!

The basic premise of the tool is that it allows your leaders to plan raids and optimize them by literally dragging and dropping different class specs. The right side of the screen shows buffs and debuff abilities that the spec can bring.

With buffs now being applied raid wide, it would be time consuming to manually figure out what spec your players were and what abilities they had on your own. Using RaidComp, you don’t have to do that anymore.

raidcomp-2

Right: Here you can it showing the debuffs that the raid composition I picked will be able to apply. Below the debuffs, you can see the total count of the number of tanks (based on talents), healers, Ranged DPS, Melee DPS, Mana Batteries (Replenishment), as well as Heroisms.

There are certain classes and specs that will overlap with each other. You’ll notice that Spell Damage Taken debuff is in yellow. I have a Warlock in there with Curse of Elements which increases the Spell Damage taken. There is a talent that increases the potency of Curse of Elements to 13% (Spell damage taken increase).

Alternatively, if I didn’t want the Warlock to pick up that spec or if they didn’t want to get the talents for whatever reason, I can mouse over that and it will show me the other classes and spells that can do the same thing I want. You can see what it looks like below.

raidcomp-4

Below: And just for fun, here’s a test raid that I threw together just for kicks to ensure that I could get every possible buff and debuff so you can see what it looks like. It offers full support for a 40 man raid. Not only that, you can even export builds as links and share them with other players.

raidcomp-3

A great big thanks to the tech monkeys at MMO-Champion for coming up with this nifty script!

WI: Healing at Level 80 and Other Matt-like Distractions

Almost 3000 words. It took 32 oz of coffee before I finally finished this mammoth of a post. It’s finished and you can find it on at WoW Insider.

Are you on your coffee break?
Don’t have much time to read it?
Want to know what I have to say in 30 seconds?

Here’s a shortened version of the post in slide format:

Raid Healing at Level 80

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: world of)

Why Slides? I have a presentation to deliver in another month. I wanted to get familiar with Keynote. I’ve been dying to try out Slideshare for the longest time. I only spent about 90 minutes on this TLDR version (Too Long, Didn’t Read). There’s even the option of synching audio tracks with slides. Screw podcasts! I might just start a slidecast!

Nothing fancy, mostly images and words (90 minutes, right?). Presenting and public speaking are two important academic skills. I do have a presentation to give next month in front of my peers (It’s Criminology related). I’m going to need time to learn and design accordingly.

Some other non-WoW related presentations

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design crisis)

Brain Rules for Presenters

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: reynolds garr)

Blocked at work?

For when you get home: