With the holiday season coming up, more and more of us will be staying up late at night playing video games. I want to take a moment and recommend a program called F.lux. It auto dims or brightens your computer screen according to the time of day it is. When it’s evening, it sets the display to appear indoorsy and when it’s daylight, it’ll return brightness to optimum levels. I highly recommend it.
The Old Republic
I received my early access today and spent a good part of my schedule playing and getting reaccustomed to the game. I rolled a Sith Inquisitor (Sorcerer). Just can’t stop healing. Level 13 after about 6 hours. SWTOR has been labelled as a WoW clone with Star Wars skins. I agree with this and I’m not opposed to it. It’s nice to have transferable knowledge and skills from one game to another. I compare it to how in FPS games, you don’t really need to re-learn how to find cover, strafe or aim. In SWTOR, it’s easy to break line of sight, kite and do other standard things. Those of you looking for a completely new gaming archetype won’t be satisfied with it.
Healing feels quite similar to WoW. The resources used though are the biggest changes. Having a healer that relies on energy or is a GCD healer is going to be interesting. If I wasn’t playing an Inquisitor, I would’ve played an Imperial Agent (Operative) instead. With so many instant cast heals, they felt like Resto Druids to me during the beta.
One thing I’ve noticed in SWTOR is that I’ve run into players who just plain aren’t familiar with the actual MMO genre or they’re just not very bright. I was speaking with a friend of mine who agreed. He shares with me a story of how he was running by a player who was dead on the ground. He resurrected him and that player proceeded to run into another pack of mobs. He took out two or three before he was overwhelmed. He didn’t release or let go. After a few more of these, my friend messaged him to try to find out what he was doing. It turns out he’s been at this for a while because he has no idea how to come back to life. He did not know about the button in the middle of the screen that can be pressed to trigger a med evac.
This whole time he had been relying on players running by him and resurrecting him.
My friend understandable became demoralized and just walked away while the player he was with decided to pull another 4 mobs.
So the dialog and choices stuff is cool. But I confess, I simply skip most of it. I end up reading faster than the actual dialog and conversations and automatically pick the choices that are the most negative. It’s neat with the interaction and all that, but I know I’ll get tired of it quick. This is especially true in instances because you may run into cases where someone takes a long time to make a selection or AFKs out or something. If you instance grind with a group of players you know who all space bar (or skip) their way through dialog, it feels like a quicker leveling experience. But once you’re on your 4th or 5th run through of Black Talon, it gets old fast. I suppose I’m not one for patience.
Conquest in SWTOR?
Speaking of the Old Republic, if you’ve got the game but are looking around for a guild to join, you’re welcome to join my crew and I. While I would love to be able to raid and try out their end game, the reality is that I would not be able to seriously commit to two end game raiding activities. I’d have to find another player willing to organize and handle that aspect of it. But it’s too early to worry about that. For now, if you’re looking for a home:
Server: Warriors of the Shadow
Faction: Empire
Just add Matticus to your friends list or post a comment here or use smoke signals to get a hold of me.
How’s WoW going?
We hit 6/8 normal mode last week. We ran out of time as players had to leave but there was enough for a 10 man to take a look at Spine of Deathwing. That fell over within 2 attempts. All that remains now is Madness of Deathwing. There’s been some debate between leaving Alexstrasza last or Kalecgos last. Personally, I’m in favor of leaving Alexstrasza last so that we don’t have to worry about those mini-tentacles and just DPS the claw down. Others say that the 25% damage increase is much more favorable. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer but I do believe one approach is better for our group than the other.
Still looking for Balance Druids, Shadow Priests, Warlocks, Mages.
Glad your enjoying SWTOR. I played it at PAX East last year and was completely unimpressed. I hope it has shaped up since then.
For Madness, we did our 1st kill with Alex last, and the DPS was really tight. We could no longer AOE down the bloods w/o the blue buff, so we lost a lot of time. We now leave Kali up as the dps loss from killing the tentacles is far lower. Do kill the tentacles though, we tried ignoring the second set, and that was a total failure.
It depends on your raid’s strengths, but I would def say leaving Blue up is easier.
Can you tell me if your setup was on 10 or 25?
I would leave Kalecgosa to last otherwise run risk of 3 impales and adds taking forever to die as you also don’t have time slower. doesn’t hurt to try alex last though particularly if melee heavy(but i don’t think it will be easier), below is how we did it which seemed to work well for us.
I did it 25m and 10m(3 healed just because never tried 10m), fight is much the same except less damage taken on 10m. recommend you only use 1 major cd and a few smaller cds for last platform’s bolt and spread the rest of the cds out through the blistering, If you don’t survive i would look at logs to see who is not switching.
we did green->red->yellow->blue, could see maybe swapping red and yellow on 10m if you have nightmares about blistering tentacles. Might pay to do same order we did as practice for 25m where the extra bolt landing might cause issues.
Generally we 25m things but one too many progression attempts meant we had to call raid for the week so last week did 10m after usual raid :'(.
We did green->yellow->red->blue, 10 and 25, worked pretty successful, if you watch out for a couple small things. (we tested blue->red in the end, which helps training the healers, but in the end blue is easier as final one if you healers can deal with it. Worst case bring a Unholy DK for the elementium bolt, it trivializes the encounter since only 25% of the damage hits through the AMZ)
First and second platform are warm up.
Third one:
Stay spread from the beginning, switch fast to the tentacle.
Wait until the elementium bolt is cast, then stack up near the “wing” that grips on the platform (impact damage lower if you stand further away). Use raid cooldown to deal with the impact, then burst damage on the bolt.
The tricky part is to heal the people who need it. After the impact the tentacle with hit people and they need HP to survive, so healing up evenly is crucial. There is no use if some people are full and others die due to being neglected.
Then continue as before.
Fourth is the same as before, but you have to kill the tentacles that sprout on the hand. You want to use more raid (and single) cooldowns, since people have 30% less hp when the elementium bolt hits. Same rules apply.
It can be tricky if you have blood and tentacles same time, but usually that only happens if DPS does not switch properly or you have too much damage, in which case you should not have problems killing it off.
If you try a couple times (some tries will just screw up due to bad tentacle smashes ) you should not have problems until p2.
Phase 2:
Which is where the crap starts, unless you KNOW what will happen.
The small tentacles have a fire animation on the ground, make sure you focus on the clusters first to lower damage (use AOE!). People need to watch their debuff and the castbar (they all cast at the same time, so a tank can call it) to use the cooldown on the shrapnel.
As soon the timezone spawns, the tank should get into it, taunt the adds. Paladins can bubble out of a stack and should do it. Focus one add and keep a battle rez ready for the tank. Kill the second add, focus the boss.
Do one or two waves (25m you will do two waves), make sure the boss has about 6% health, not less.
As soon the second add wave dies, stack up (!!!!), hit bloodlust and focus on the boss. (even tanks)
Have everybody hit their special key at 5%, use raid cooldowns and push AOE heal like you never have before because it will get ugly. People will die, but so will the boss since you only have to get to about 2%.
Do NOT underestimate the damage. We did it so far twize and the healers keep being surprised how hard that stuff hits. People will die, make sure everybody knows that, do not give up, you will easy (!) get him down if you were at 25 people before 5%.
[Case you use AMZ: Do not pair it with spirit link totem since it will break it and make sure you put it up the last possible moment, to prevent the ticking damage that is there all the time destroys it too early]
We went for for green red yellow blue. If you think you can rely on your healers that is a good combo to go for. Do not go for Alex as last target! You will have huge problems with killing the blood adds and you will need a damage buff so the cataclysm will not kill you. Keep Kalec until the end. First you get 20% more dmg and second the spellweaving buff applies until the very end when you need every bit of damage on blood and Alex’s tentancles(yes, even though they are immune to AOE the spellweaving does work!). It does not really matter if you take yellow or red after green. We took red first, because the damage gets higher at the and of the fight and the first platforms are quite relaxed, so you kill red because the raid will have 20% less hp in the end anyway and we found it easier to keep the damage buff longer than the life buff. We did not have healing problems but rather dps problems woth other combos.