I've just rejoined an endgame guild (my Hunter just recently hit 70), and while I used to run Heroics pretty often on my Shaman with my old guild, my new guild is much smaller -- while I like them a lot, they aren't as much into running instances as I am, so endgame instance runs are few and far between with them.
So I'm left to PuG Heroics on my own, and I'm having the same problem deviate_delight is: getting into PuG Heroic groups isn't proving to be easy. I'm a good player, and my gear is pretty good (OK, to be truthful, it's probably a little low, and I just need to keep running non-Heroic stuff a little more until I get luckier with loot drops), but for some reason, I'm having a tough time making my way into Heroic groups.
So let's put the question out to you readers: any advice for players like me and d_d on how to start Heroic dungeons without guildies to run with? Anyone have a strategy for getting a good, regular Heroic group together, or how to make it so that Heroic runners seek you out when they need a DPS (or tank or healer or whatever you are)? Heroics are great places, full of good loot and badges and all kinds of things that can help immensely with the endgame, but with the wrong people, they can really ruin your day. How can we get a group that works?
Consider yourself lucky if you've never seen the sight above before -- it's the sign of a former guildleader yanking everything out of the guild bank (including all the stuff above and a good 12,000g) and transferring off to another server. Good times. This is why I usually keep all of my Hearts of Darkness under my mattress at home -- the banks just aren't safe.
This isn't the only guild leader ninja we heard about this week, and it's definitely not the only messy drama -- there's lots more right after you click the link below. Don't forget to send in your tips about drama, downed and recruiting news from around the realms to wowguildwatch@gmail.com. We really appreciate it, and lovers of drama of all kinds do too.
Why now? | Alts Ahoy All of a sudden Nasirah enjoys playing a shaman where it was boring before. In this post, she muses on why her mind has changed.
How to annoy NPC's - Keep Clicking on them! | Pugnacious Priest Amusing detective work shows what happens when you annoy an NPC, including quotes on what they'll do to you if you don't stop. To bad you can't back-talk them too.
Raid composition is going to change in Wrath of the Lich King. A certain part of this is obvious and inevitable: they're adding a new class. But there is another major factor that's changing. Currently, buffs and synergy are a large part of the reason you might choose to bring one class over another. Shamans' awesome Bloodlust/Heroism, for instance, and their Windfury Totem, has made it often a good idea to bring many Shamans to a 25-man raid, and almost mandatory to have at least one. Similarly, the fact that Warlocks synergize quite well with each other (Warlocks cause other Warlocks to do more damage), due to effects like that of Improved Shadow Bolt, has contributed to Mages being much less favored for Sunwell Plateau.
How is this going to change in Wrath? Ghostcrawler made another rather long post yesterday on raid stacking, and this is the essence of what he said:
We want to limit the power of stacking raid buffs, like we limited the power of stacking consumables earlier.
"We want the challenge of the encounter to be the fight itself, not collecting all of the buffs and debuffs you need to succeed." They don't want to nerf buffs, but they want them to be "less of a burden."
Therefore, for most buffs, there will be multiple classes that can provide that buff, and they won't stack. For instance, you can get your magic vulnerability debuff either from Warlocks or from Death Knights; those two abilities will not stack with each other.
The ultimate goal of this is to cause raid leaders to want to bring players they like, or good players, and not feel like they have to bring certain classes to get certain buffs and debuffs; and also to help class balance. Of course, they recognize that certain guilds are going to strictly min/max in any case, but the idea is that the benefits of a few classes shouldn't be so overwhelming that you feel like you have to bring five of them.
It's an interesting move. Assuming they execute it well, and preserve class uniqueness and utility (as they are promising to do), I think it will be very good for the game. And as this is still beta, and they are actively collecting and implementing feedback, if it doesn't work well right now they'll have time to fix it. The Wrath development team seems (thankfully) much more responsive to feedback than the Burning Crusade dev team was.
They start out by talking about the changes with 10 and 25 man raiding, and Kaplan says plainly that the Burning Crusade endgame was just too plain hard: "We just had: 'OK, welcome to level 70, here's a brick wall. Maybe you can climb it.'" There will still be a hardcore endgame in Wrath, but it'll be later on, near the very end of the raiding ladder. They also describe Wrath as a "coming home" moment -- after an "exploratory" period in Outland, Wrath will be a return to Warcraft's tradition and lore. And perhaps most surprising, Brack actually lends a lot of credence to a question about a graphical overhaul "from the ground up." He says that by the next expansion they'll "probably" have to look at updating the graphics system completely.
And finally, Blizzard believes that yes, even though it doesn't seem like it now, eventually there'll be something bigger than World of Warcraft. Brack's last word is an interesting look at the future: "Something will come along and WoW will be like EverQuest: a great game I played back in the day."
Here's a nice tidbit from the Games convention at Leipzig, Germany in the form a bundle of Wrath news. Tom Chilton and J. Allen Brack gave a pair of interviews to Getbuffed.de and Gamona.de. In the Getbuffed interview embedded above, they discuss the future of the lore and raids, most notably Icecrown Glacier, the home of Arthas.
The current Wrath of the Lich King beta has had a lot of ups and downs. At present, since you can't say any class is finished and talents and abilities are subject to change at a moment's notice, all that can really be done is to evaluate what's currently the situation with the class. (As a warning, everything beyond this sentence will most likely be full of spoilers.)
My general overview would be 'flawed, but with a good deal of potential'. I've covered my favorite talent to death, and the situation remains the same as it did last week, so I'm not going to belabor that particular deceased equine. I should point out that I'm still using the talent in my current build at level 75, and doing very good DPS in instances, tanking, and soloing with it too. I try and respec every day and have that day be dedicated to testing out talents and abilities, but when I decide to push for the next level, I always go back to a heavy fury TG spec. The burst damage potential of TG itself is half of the equation, but the other half is how wildly improved Bloodthirst is. To put it succinctly, I can now regain about 1000 health every 6 seconds. Sometimes, I actually end fights healed from when I went into them. Mortal Strike will probably remain the king of PvP, but for leveling I cannot imagine not taking bloodthirst now. You will bandage maybe one fight in ten. You will eat to get a food buff. It's that good.
I'm going to try and go over as many comments from last week and answer what I can, and when I can't answer them I'll try and be up front and say so. I've not had a chance to do everything: I'm trying to level a shaman and a warrior to 77 as fast as possible and that's while still MTing for my guild for a full raid schedule.
Welcome to another edition of Scattered Shots, the other WoW Insider weekly Hunter column. Daniel Whitcomb is your guest host again this week.
So, we theorized about talented pets a bit quite a few installments of Scattered Shots ago, but now we have the actual trees live and testable on the Wrath Beta, and they seem to be firming up nicely. There's a few promised changes yet to come, such as the removal or lowering of focus costs on many major abilities and talents, and it's still very possible that Blizzard may make changes here and there before live, but I think they're solid enough at this point that we can look at each tree and make some solid predictions about how people will use them and how various talent builds might look.
Chalk up another piece of evidence for just how trivial the old world stuff will be when Wrath releases -- here's a video of a Hunter at level 77 (on the beta servers, obviously) soloing the original raid boss herself, Onyxia. There's a little more info about how it was done over on the WarcraftMovies page -- the only way to deal with all the whelps was to max out AoE, so he used a special talent blend just to do this. And it looks like he just dodged or ate the Deep Breaths, as I doubt even a 77 Hunter would be able to put up enough "dots" to down her before she can do too many. Roar of Sacrifice also got a lot of usage -- it's a pet talent that lets a Hunter avoid half of his pet's health in damage. And he says the two-piece set bonus from Hunter T5 helped a lot, too -- over the fight it added up to quite a bit of healing.
Not too shabby. And at 77, this means there's still three levels (not to mention all the endgame gear) to grow. Maybe the fact that Blizzard is revamping/replacing the old endgame isn't so bad after all -- when it's this easy for the highest level players, it's time to move on. Unless, of course, they make soloing Ony an achievement.
Tanking has been getting a good, long look from the developers for Wrath of the Lich King. And about time, too – I'd say the number one issue right now in the group PvE game is a lack of tanks. Introducing another tank class is going to help, of course, especially when it's one as cool as the Death Knight, but that's not all that's being done.
Most characters in tanking classes (Warriors, Druids, Paladins, Death Knights) should be able to tank a normal five-man just fine, with heal specs (for Druids and Paladins) being the exception.
Heroics and raids will require investment in tanking talents, but all tanking classes should be able to tank them if appropriately specced. Ghostcrawler notes that this is a change of strategy for Blizz; previously, for instance, feral druids were positioned by the devs as being better off-tanks than main tanks. Now, he says, "if nearly all guilds want the same class as their MT, we've failed."
Now that the scramble for tickets is over, it remains for the wounded and battered veterans of the battle against the Fail Murloc to gird themselves and march forward, looking for succor where they can get it.
Luckily, a list of panels for BlizzCon 2008 has been released, giving us something awesome to look forward to as we count down the days. For those of you who can't make it, be sure to check WoW Insider. We'll have liveblogs and notes from each WoW panel so you'll know exactly what was said and how it will affect your gameplaying experience. For the Diablo III and Starcraft II stuff, you'll be able to get the same treatment from our sister site, Joystiq.
Check after the break for a complete list of panel titles.
Apparently the new policy on raid stealing is to report early and in detail. Blizzard poster Belfaire, in a thread entitled 'Raid Harassment' explains in response to a post about a couple of people using a gullible guildmate's trust to snag his raid ID by 'asking for help on quests' and then wiping them repeatedly on Illidan attempts. Seems that now, if this kind of thing happens to you, (I once zoned into MC to find that, instead of half done, it had been cleared up to Ragnaros by another guild that had just accepted one of our mages as a member... he brought our raid ID with him, so they decided to take advantage of not having to do the first three bosses.)
The change in policy may not make much of an actual difference in some situations... if someone's wiping your raid on boss attempts, the GM's probably won't be able to act before your raid is done for the night... but it's miles ahead of the 'there's nothing we can do' policy that's been enacted in the past. After all, it is possible for GM's to teleport jerks off of the Isle of Quel'Danas when they're making the badge vendor impossible to reach, so maybe they'll start porting griefers like the ones in Ironhide's post. I can only agree with poster Podric, and Belfaire himself, when they say that it's about time for this change.
And yet we play World of Warcraft all the time. You wouldn't think this tiny little tell, above, would cause a guild to rupture apart, but in fact it did exactly that -- Runforyalife sent this tell to someone, they posted it on the forums, and the next thing you know, the GM had kicked Run right out. For his part, Run regrets what he said (we think the GM is a little testy, and whoever posted the tell is at fault, too), but there's a point to be made here: even the little tells you send in game can cause big trouble.
All this drama and more after the break. We've got good news too, though: there are guild downings aplenty, as well as a few recruiting notices (though it seems recruiting has slowed down with the Wrath beta in full force. If you've got a tip, send it to wowguildwatch@gmail.com as always. Click the link below to read on.
Good old Tranquilizing Shot seems to be getting a lot of attention in the beta world yesterday. Ever since it was bought back to prominence when it inherited Arcane Shot's old dispel mechanic and the ability to dispel PvP enrage mechanics, people have been wondering what exactly it will be able to do in PvE.
Lead encounter designer Daelo clarified the other day with some information on how enrage type effects will work in Wrath:
It was perhaps one of the most unexpected and controversial changes to hit Wrath Beta: Potion Sickness, the debuff that spelled the end of chain-chugging by allowing only one potion to be quaffed per combat and no more. Some people loved, since it would cut down on pre-raid farming and perhaps allow for bosses to be balanced more around classes and roles and less around Haste, Ironshield, and Destruction potions. Some saw it as a major nerf to Alchemists and to casters who were used to chaining mana pots to stay in the blue.
I've just rejoined an endgame guild (my Hunter just recently hit 70), and while I used to run Heroics pretty often on my Shaman with my old guild, my new guild is much smaller -- while I like them a lot, they aren't as much into running instances as I am, so endgame instance runs are few and far between with them.
Chilton and Brack are just all kinds of talkative at the Leipzig Games Convention this year -- in addition to 
Welcome to another edition of 
Tanking has been getting a good, long look from the developers for 
Apparently the new policy on raid stealing is 
It was perhaps one of the most unexpected and controversial changes to hit Wrath Beta: 
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