Posted on December 14th, 2009 by admin
Welcome to another installment of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that is incredibly proud of mages. We are, after all, the only class in the game that can conjure our own 5-man group, as evidenced by the picture above. And though our mirror images may not be too bright, I’d still take them over about 3/4ths of the folks I PuGed with last night.
Holy crap. I’m not even kidding. It was like some kind of idiot convention, and I was the keynote speaker. I came in with some prepared remarks, like “Don’t stand in the green stuff that looks like poison, because it is poison,” “when he begins spinning his giant sword around like a whirlwind, it’s because he’s doing Whirlwind and you should get out of the way,” and “Warlocks drink their own pee,” but ended up just sighing and shaking my head a lot.
This whole Dungeon Finder tool is incredible, right? My head has been spinning since the patch dropped, marveling at
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Posted on December 10th, 2009 by admin
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW’s newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to’s, visit WoW.com’s WoW Rookie Guide.
Now that you can spice up your leveling experience by adding a little PvP to the mix, you owe it to yourself to do it up right. Battlegrounds can be bufuddling for new players, and WoW Rookie would be sad to hear you’d given up on them based on a couple of false starts. Head straight over to Zach Yonzon’s A-to-Z coverage of Battleground basics in The Art of War(craft)’s Absolute beginner’s guide to the Battlegrounds. Join us after the break for a complete list of the Battlegrounds you can enjoy, starting at level 10.
Absolute beginner’s guide to Battlegrounds
An overview of the Battlegrounds experience.
The absolute beginner’s guide to Warsong Gulch Warsong Gulch is a classic capture-the-flag game for 10 players per side. You can enter
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Posted on December 7th, 2009 by admin
Every week (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a UI and addons blog for WoW.
With patch 3.3 very close on the horizon, I figured now might be a good time to go over the few changes priests will be seeing. I’m also going to provide a list of possible juicy items for you to look forward to from the Icecrown Citadel raid, the Icecrown dungeons and the Emblem of Frost vendor. After all, you can’t look to take down Arthas without sporting some new threads, right?
Let’s start off with the class changes.
Divine Hymn: Cooldown reduced to 8 minutes (currently at 10 minutes). This was largely done to help ensure that certain cooldowns would become available faster when working on encounters with limited attempts. In other words, it sucked that Trial of the Grand Crusader attempts would last for about 3 minutes or so before
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Posted on November 30th, 2009 by admin
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the idea of using spells based around procs or on-use trinkets. Now I don’t know about you, but I sometimes tend to forget that I have these on-use abilities. Other times I never notice procs going off.
But first, what is a proc anyway?
A proc is short for procedure. They are events that happen when conditions are triggered. For example, Val’anyr will trigger a buff for the user when they heal players. This buff then grants the player to place shields on anyone they heal.
Chance on use procs
These ones are a bit trickier to base spells around of. They’re random and the effects will only kick in after you meet a condition (heal a player, damage a target, etc). Something like Solace of the Defeated will kick in
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Posted on November 26th, 2009 by admin
We can’t believe it either – Turpster has been let loose on WoW.com to bring you videos from in and around the World of Warcraft! You’ve heard him on the WoW Insider Show, and now see him on TurpsterVision right here on WoW.com.
It’s been far too long. I’ve been playing loads of games in-between knuckling down with some university work, I’ve constructed a website for a Bristol based landscape gardener, and I’ve been on a couple of different podcasts. Yet with all this I’ve missed out on gracing the net with WoW.com’s number 1 Video Podcast! In the immortal words of Tychus J. Findlay, ‘Hell, it’s about time!‘
But I wouldn’t just return to your screens empty handed, oh no, I come bearing gifts! A mighty tankard overflowing with ale — at least it could be if you are lucky enough to win it and fill it with some booze or other beverage of your choosing.
The stein itself is a beautiful piece of art and
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Posted on November 24th, 2009 by admin
Happy Pilgrim’s Bounty! Before you rush off in excitement to check out the new holiday, why not spend a few minutes reading through some of your favorite WoW-related webcomics?
Battlemasters: A Small Party.
Cru the Dwarf: We’ll Meet Again.
Dark Legacy Comics: Profit!
Experience Points: AFK.
NoObz: Sixth Commandment.
Teh Gladiators: Such Tuneful Words, Like Penguin Squak!
NPC: Podfans. Also, Stream Fright and Oh the Humanity. I love his last response!
Daily Quests: All’s Fair in Love and Warcraft.
LFG #305 and #306.
Dungeons and Draenei: RP Servers.
Beyond the Tree: Descent.
Complex Actions: Cutting Out the Middle Man.
Slash AFK: Turkey Fun.
Check out this WoW-themed comic from FoxTrot.
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Posted on November 19th, 2009 by admin
Apparently MSN video has now been rebranded as Bing, and that hasn’t stopped The Guild from posting their latest video, but it does mean that you’ll have to install Microsoft’s Silverlight to watch it there. If not, you can hit up Xbox Live to watch it in HD if you happen to have one of those, or jump after the break below to watch it embedded here on the site. This week, the Guild goes to battle, with nothing less than their very existence on the line. And all of this season’s other storylines move towards their finale as well, from Clara’s relationship to Tink’s rebellion.
Good stuff. And speaking of good stuff, Jeff “Vork” Lewis finally got his own account on Twitter the other day, and we all benefit: he used the account to give permission to share these classic pictures of Vork as a kid. No offense to Jeff, but man, the dude was born to play the part of a guildleader. Stay tuned for next week’s final episode of the season!
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Posted on November 16th, 2009 by admin
Yesterday’s Breakfast Topic was revealing. Revealing in that I revealed that I watch Project Runway. You guys said some stuff, too, I think? I’ll have to go back and look.
Ah, yep. Okay. You guys hate the Goku haircut as much as I do. It’s probably the worst one in the game. But hey, we’re not here today to decry current hairstyles. Our trip to the stylist today is all about what we’d like to see added instead of removed.
I commented yesterday on the sheer number of awesome hipster haircuts that female goblins are getting, and that’s what I want. I want more modern haircuts for all of the races, especially the girls. I think I count three bobs for blood elf females alone! Give ‘em an awesome Rock Band-style pixie cut. Give troll females a few haircuts that don’t make them look like Bugs Bunny antagonists. Let my night elf male be Morrissey. Let human males have a haircut that doesn’t make them look like a member of the Village
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Posted on November 12th, 2009 by admin
A new round of updated PTR patch notes have been released this afternoon for patch 3.3. There’s only one update, but it’s a large and important one for the folks on the PTR:
General: Halls of Reflection in Icecrown Citadel available for testing. All three wings of the 5-player dungeon are currently available for testing.
Halls of Reflection is the third and final wing of the 5-man dungeons opening up in Patch 3.3. These dungeons, including the Pit of Saron and the Forge of Souls will offer the best 5-man loot currently available in the game. When they’re combined with the new dungeon matchmaking system, everyone should be quite happy to run them as often as they want.
We’ll have more information on the dungeon once the PTR come back up later today.
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Posted on November 9th, 2009 by admin
The new random dungeon feature in patch 3.3 promises to change how we PuG. Not only will you be able to run the same heroic more than once in a day if that’s how the luck of the draw works out (a feature that would have been very handy for me back in the days of farming CoS for a fist weapon, which of course never dropped for my shaman) but we’ll be able to get fabulous prizes (well, if you’re into mini pets anyway) for doing so. Like many curious folk, I went onto the PTR myself to try it out I logged onto my death knight (not a premade, so warts and all) and signed up for a DPS slot, figuring that would be the longest wait. Amazingly it popped almost immediately and we were soon pugging our way through the Pit of Saron, with no major glitches aside from a tumble I myself took off of a cliff during a fight.
The whole experience was pretty much universally positive for me, so I’m looking forward to seeing the implementation in patch 3.3. My question for you
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