I decided to take a stroll through the Terrace of Light over the weekend to speak with my good friend Adal. An eery feeling swept over my entire body as I took my first steps out of the Aldor bank, I was not alone..

I trundled into the Terrace and heard the whispering of a thousand souls, as clear as if they were still walking on the same plain of existence as I, when suddenly a voice cried out from over my shoulder…

“Hey Buddy, you got a moment to spare to have a look at something over here? You might find something you like!”

The shadowy figure called out, the details of anything besides a vague body shape eluded me as the figure had positioned himself discretely underneath the cover of a raised platform inside the terrace. The light produced by the Quel Danas portal behind him made it increasingly hard to make out who he was. As I stepped closer the man who spoke to me was revealed as a Draenei that I had not yet seen before. his name was Anwehu, and is a vendor of high-quality equipment … at a price. His posture was incredible, his back upright at all times, and eyes always on the lookout for potential suckers customers.

Anwehu extended an open hand, welcoming me closer…

We spent a few moments discussing the state of Outlands, as I sifted through what the man had to offer. The Leggings of the Pursuit caught my eye, at a huge 100badges. I tried to haggle his price down to no avail, the man drives a hard bargain.

I just can’t help myself but keep farming badges to buy more gear for my alts. Unfortunately none of the badge gear is an upgrade for my Priest .. but nonetheless it is a great source of “catch-up” gear for my Hunter and Druid.

I’m thankful that we don’t have to deal with people being piled all over the badge vendor upon release. Or else I would probably end myself.

Happy Badge Farming 8D

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Despite my love for my Priest, I can’t help but be overwhelmed with a sense of pride in my alt class, The Druid! Oh how far you have come, I can’t wait to level you in the expansion (As Boomkin, which I have never specced mind you.)

Anyways … This one’s for you BEE ARR KAY!

home:  –noun

• 1. The usual residence of a person, family, or household.
• 2. the place in which one’s domestic affections are centered.
• 3. an institution for the homeless, sick, etc. (a nursing home.)
• 4. the dwelling place or retreat of an animal.
• 5. the place or region where something is native or most common.
• 6. any place of residence or refuge: a heavenly home.

Everyones’ experiences vary from my own, depending on what server you play on, which faction, and a host of other possibilities that affect your “lifestyle” in WoW. In no way am I suggesting that everybody feels comfortable enough with their guild that they can call it “home”. Like it or not when you’re socialising with people in your guild as often as most of us are, you can’t help the feeling of comfort that grows as you get to know them better.

Recently my guild of 2years decided to call it quits. With the addition of badge gear and the alleviation of Black Temple & Mount Hyjal attunements it became too hard to tell between the good players and the bad. Unfortunately my server has an abundance of the latter, and a massive shortage of good players. With expansion on the horizon it was the best idea to give everyone a break from raiding, rather than continue to blunder through BT regearing handfuls of randoms and relearning all the encounters again. A lot of the core raiders were very much burned out, and happy to take a break until Wotlk, as we had just spent the entirety of TBC busting our asses to clear current content (we killed Illidan the week after Sunwell was released.)

Over such a long time in my previous guild, I had grown very close friendships with both the officers, and the other core raiders. Even the non-raiders who were friends of guildmates had become close friends of mine. I have since moved to a new guild and have lost touch with some members of my previous guild who I held close to my heart, but was only able to contact them via Guild Chat. Now that I can’t speak to them freely in guild chat I miss them quite a lot more than I had expected.

My new guild is more progressed, and are generally better players. A lot of mathcraft is spoken in guild chat, and the players are very quick to let you know that your spec may be off, or that you could do something better with your current playstyle. As elitest as this sounds, it can only be expected when you get a guild full of players who know their shit. Both the DPS players, Healers, and tanks are great players in this guild.

I have noticed that I am a lot more reluctant to chat casually in guild chat, for fear of saying something out of line, and incase I say something wrong. I trust my own abilities and knowledge about the Priest class, and stick by my belief that with equal gear to their raid healing Shamans, I can perform better, both in HPS and efficiency.

After a couple of weeks in my new home, I’m feeling a lot more comfortable with my position in the guild. I have gained a regular healing position for our guilds ZA bear runs (we have completed the last two resets with 7mins to spare, with two Warrior tanks mind you). I am raiding BT with them weekly and have seen my share of Sunwell so far, and am yet to see Muru. I am communicating with the other Priests in the guild about bossfight strategy and other Priestly information which is GREAT. One of the things I missed about my previous guild is that there was one Holy Priest besides myself, and we rarely had a chance to chat about anything relating to our class together.

If you have recently joined a new guild and are feeling a little unsure of yourself, or whether you are being accepted by your new guildmates, keep the following in mind:

1. Get involved in any conversations that interest you. If you become more vocal in guild chat and put in your 2cents (as long as you aren’t causing arguments, or being over-opinionated on subjects .. you should be in the clear). Put simply, be vocal.
2. Get involved in any guild runs that you can. Whether it be Karazhan / Zul Aman, or 25man instances like Gruuls. Whether this be an alt run or not, any opportunity to run instances with your new brethren should be taken. It’s a good opportunity to prove your worth, and get to know the people you’ll be raiding with a little better.
3. Re-hashing on my recent post regarding a new member to my previous guild, be prepared. Make sure that you have all your consumables ready and you’re prepared to raid when invitations go out. This is relative to the new guild that you’re raiding with naturally. The more hardcore raiding guild they are the more that they’ll Soup-Nazi you for not taking consumables. DO NOT BECOME ANOTHER STATISTIC of sub-par applications who trial for good guilds with the false pretence that they can survive without being prepared.

With WotLK approaching quickly, I’m sure that plenty of other people will find themselves in the EXACT same situation. If you’re looking to continue raiding until WotLK comes out, do what you can to make new friends and leave your options open. If you’re joining a new guild this close to the release of expansion, it would be advised to become as close with them as possible, to firm your place in the guild after you have levelled your character to 80.

Whatever situation you find yourself in as we wind down in preparation for WotLK, I wish you all the best

A new member of my guild approached me recently with a somewhat confidential question. He is concerned about the impression that he is making upon other members in the guild. On top of the normal new-guild jitters, he is a recent transfer to the server with a warglaive from Illidan.

Now I’ve not been in this situation for quite some time, and even if I was I’m not sure that I would be quite so concerned. Regardless, a lot of people out there are extremely concerned about their image in a new guild. If you’re a transfer from another server with decent gear the tension is magnified. The pressure to perform and to fit into your new home is always felt, would you speak out to a total stranger to express your concern and ask for advice?

The advice

If you’re in this same situation, have in fact not bought the account, have not lied about your raid experience and know how to play your class, here’s how I see it:

As long as  you are punctual, and perform well during raids the officers / guildmembers shouldn’t have a bad word to say about you. Make sure that you bring your food & elixirs / flasks, reagents and class specific raid consumables with you to all raids. Being involved in conversations, and taking part in instances with guildmates (whether it be 5mans, 10mans or 25mans that are long beyond farm ie. Gruuls Lair / Magtheridon) will only increase your popularity with your guildmates even further.

Like it or not, WoW is an extremely social game. At raiding guild level, the social aspect of the game impacts heavily on peoples attendance, attitudes, and overall performance in raids. It will even affect whether or not people remain in a guild, whether it be by their choice or by the swift gkick of justice from an officer of the guild.

Remember kids, be prepared, be on the ball, and be happy <3

The Blizzard Worldwide Invitational 2008 was held over the recent weekend. The Dungeon & Raids panel had a lot of updates on the anatomy of dungeons, and tidbits of information relating to the Dungeons & Raids to come in the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I am going to give my $0.02 on the proposed changes in WotLK.

Cory Stockton, lead level designer; J. Allen Brack, lead producer and Tom Chilton, lead game designer all took to the podium. Here’s a few points that I found interesting:

Heroics will return: really happy with the way heroics played out in TBC, want to bring it back. Lots of plans for heroics, more tuning, changing things up from standard 5-mans. Thinks players will like the direction.

Heroic instances are definetely the way of the future. It’s an easy way of re-using instances that were in place as a levelling instance, much like the structure of Heroics in The Burning Crusade. I am very interested to see how much tuning goes into instances to make them different / harder than on normal mode. I am also very interested to find out how many, if any of the  old pre-bc instances will be re-used (as it has already been stated that a reworked Naxxramus will be the first 25man instance of WotLK).

More nonlinear content. More choices for players, don’t always have one path to take in dungeons. Give players a bit more of a choice so dungeon is a different experience if you do it more than once. The Occulus is a good example.

I’m not too sure about this one. It’s all well and good having multiple paths to complete an instance, but it really opens the door to arguments about which path to take, or which order to do certain pulls in. The issue with having to group with retards who have no idea what’s going on makes me increasingly uneasy about this idea. With that said, it does leave the possibility open to have different paths easier to handle with different group makeups. It would be interesting to see an instance with multiple paths to take where one may be easier for a Tankadin, whilst another may be easier for a cc heavy, party with a Prot Warrior tanking.

Spirit shard reward system for all raids/dungeons based on Wintergrasp PvP. Whoever controls  Wintergrasp can get spirit shards from all bosses in all dungeons/raids in the game. Use them to buy unique items, enchants, etc. Still working on reward system but connects pvp with pve. Help the two merge together over time, somewhat separated, same goal for player: advancement.

The largest issue I found with a system like this is that in TBC, the gear obtainable by these methods was largely worthless due to easily obtainable upgrades from PVP. A large portion of Heroic badges are no longer spent at the vendor in outlands, because the badges gear from said vendor is easily replacable by other means that were put into place after the introduction of the BoJ Reward Vendor.

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level-up dungeons. Similar to TBC. Were really happy with that amount of content. Can always do more dungeons, but would rather keep quality.

As with TBC, I really like this idea. It should allow us to level to 76 or so through instances / levelling zones and make up the final 3 / 4 levels inside instances. This way we can leave the later levelling zones for extra gold. The instances can be re-used at 80 as was the standard in TBC. This is one of my favourite things implemented in The Burning Crusade.

4 level 80 dungeons. Heroics for all Lich King dungeons. So total 12 5-mans, 12 heroics. Three first-tier raid zones.

There were 6 instances designed for level 70 players at the release of tbc, although they don’t all get used all that often these days. These were The Botanica, The Mechanar, The Arcatraz, The Steamvaults, Shadow Labyrinth and Shattered Halls. With Magisters Terrace added much later.

Why 10/25 man raids? Opens up raid content to a larger audience. Takes more organisation and planning but doesn’t mean that content shouldn’t be available. Sometimes the hardest part of a 25 man raid is getting 25 people. So why not give that experience to people in smaller guilds?

Loot separation. Separating loot by a full tier worth of stat points, ultimate endgame content is 25-man so ultimate rewards. Still get great rewards in 10-mans. More loot per boss kill in 25 player raids (because there’s more players). Been talking about giving more loot in 25mans for a while, will see that change in Wrath.

A great idea, this opens up the same content to skilled players who may not have the chance to raid with a proper raiding guild. I know that there are countless players out there in guilds with enough of their friends to run Karazhan, but have neither the time or interest in raiding 25man instances over 3 / 4 nights a week with a proper raiding guild. Naturally the loot from the 10man version of the instance will not be of the same quality, but the thought of a 10man group getting the chance to see a scaled-down version of a fight like Illidan fight warms my belly.

Lessons from TBC. A big project, heroics were an interesting tuning problem, hard enough to be a challenge but easy enough that people just starting out could do them. Were a great success. But too hard, want to make them more accessible. Don’t want e.g. lacking a prot spec tank, holy priest, etc to bar people from doing heroics. Should be available to more players, open up to different classes and groups.

This is a hard one to handle seeing as some healing classes just aren’t suited to healing aoe damage. It’s unfortunate that the Vexallus fight in Magisters Terrace is so much harder for a Paladin or Druid than it is for a Priest or Shaman. The same can be said about certain other fights in TBC. It’s a tough task indeed to work bossfights so that they aren’t so aoe dependant at times without still being challenging.

Naxxramas… Again? Audience cheers; ‘that’s about the same way we feel about Naxxramas’. Huge labour of love. Always felt it was a dungeon that WoW needed. Most players never got to experience it because of the release timing. Loot was still really great but TBC superceded it. Made sense to come back to it and give everyone a chance to experience it. 10-man accessible. Extremely proud, want everyone to play it.

Lore-wise Naxx fits in perfectly, with Arthas/Northrend, history behind Naxx lends itself well to being a part of WotLK and something players can get into really early. Chance to retune it and make it even better. Huge dungeon with a ton of bosses, over 15 bosses in one raid dungeon,
non-linear (wings) giving players a lot of choice.

I can’t wait.. Back to the Future I’m really excited about going back and seeing what changes if any have been made and how they rescale it for both level80 and for the 10man version also.

How does the Death Knight fit in? Will be able to tank both raids and dungeons. Not intended to be ‘the new tank’ but is a unique tank and want to make sure they can tank raids and 5-mans, heroics, as well as DPS. Just going to do it in a different way, keeping classes unique. Looked at what players need — people always need a tank. More tanks = more dungeon runs.

This really settles my uneasiness as to whether more Hero classes will be added to the game come WotLK. I guess they will slowly add more classes as needed, but for now a new type of tank is what they’re adding. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how this one pans out.

In Summary

Plenty of interesting changes are in store. With this on the horizon and the announcement of Diablo3 on the horizon I’m going to have my hands full. I’M SO EXCITED!!