Week 3 in TOC Faction Champions

This week in TOC, raiders will face Faction Champions. The Faction Champions are a lot like the "arena event boss" back in Magister's Terrace.

You face different enemies, each representing one class: a resto druid, a shadow priest, a holy priest, a hunter, a holy paladin, a rogue, a death-knight, a warrior, a warlock and an elemental shaman.

They play quite well, and will use Dispersion when under fire or using Heroism and can't be tanked.

They can be crowd controlled but all spells only have their PVP durations and diminishing returns against them.

WoWwiki Strategy:

"Setting up /target macros for your crowd control classes will give you a good first attempt at the encounter. Like in any PvP BG, you have a choice, either control the healers or burn them. As the crowd control abilities are reduced to that of their PvP counterparts (diminishing returns apply), it is wise to focus on healers first to avoid them breaking their crowd control and healing up nearly dead NPCs. The raid makeup will decide which path to take.
Focus on the healers, pop heroism/bloodlust as the fight begins, and begin to blow it up starting with the Shaman, after the Resto Shaman is dead, move on to the Healing Priest, then to the Holy Paladin, the the Resto Druid finally, because CC is alot easier on a Druid over any other class, and control the most aggressive DPS, that being the warrior and the death knight. Pay attention to the target you are killing, as the other champions do attempt to support them, and you will need to dispel/purge shields/heals when necessary. You also need to assign ranged classes to keep the warlock's and the hunter's pets down, most likely warlocks/mages/hunters because of the high burst DPS, and it barely will affect your rotation, because they will die so quickly. As you progress onto the casters, make use of your interrupts, it slows down their DPS considerably.
The NPCs are near impossible to tank as they drop threat, so you need to slow their DPS to the best of your ability. Due to the melee DPS classes being difficult to control it is in the best interest of the raid to use heroism and bloodlust towards the start of the fight.
It is imperative that mortal strike, poisons and any other heal reduction abilities are kept up on your current targets, as the healers do occasionaly break out and heal.
The fight gets easier as the NPCs go down, so one you get a feel for the start of the fight, you will have this encounter on farm in no time.

Note: Though it is a PvP Arena-styled combat, it is not advised to attempt this encounter with a resilience set, although your PvP trinket will definitely aid you, a human or undead's racial will be fine also."

Class	Champions
	Alliance	Horde
Death knight	Tyrius Duskblade	Gorgrim Shadowcleave
Druid (Caster)	Kavina Grovesong	Birana Stormhoof
Druid (Heal)	Melador Valestrider	Erin Misthoof
Hunter	Alyssia Moonstalker and her lioness	Ruj'kah and her lioness
Mage	Noozle Whizzlestick	Ginselle Blightslinger
Paladin (Heal)	Baelnor Lightbearer	Liandra Suncaller
Paladin (Retribution)	Velanaa	Malithas Brightblade
Priest (Heal)	Anthar Forgemender	Caiphus the Stern
Priest (Shadow)	Brienna Nightfell	Vivienne Blackwhisper
Rogue	Irieth Shadowstep	Maz'dinah
Shaman (Caster)	Shaamul	Thrakgar
Shaman (Melee)	Shaabad	Broln Stouthorn
Warlock	Serissa Grimdabbler and her felhunter	Harkzog and his felhunter Zhaagrym
Warrior	Shocuul	Narrhok Steelbreaker

Loot table and Achievements on MMO-Champion.

Video: 25 man

Creative Labs WoW headset

One of the things I do here is watch the news, the WoW news that is, and it was funny as hell to watch sights like MMO-Champian and WoW.com speculate about what the Creative labs ad was about. Both of them posted images of the flash movie off Sound Blaster's Website and their images had the brightness increased, showing a hidden map in the back! OMG, could it be the new map!? After 10 years in this industry I have got to know Creative's "creative" marketing techniques. Great job Creative on fooling some of the big WoW sites out there. :P The mystery product is just a headset with Horde or Alliance logos that glow on your ear!

Creative teaser: to be continued

Creative Labs have a teaser on their Sound Blaster page which pictures a glowing Horde logo in a metal looking ring. The background music is taken out of Lament of the Highbourne. More specifically, it's from the Black Temple. So this is BC content background music. So I severely doubt that Creative are doing this in relation to anything new coming from Blizzard. To me, it looks like Creative are about to release some new sexy WoW themed speakers and this is not a teaser for any new Blizzard game. There is no way that Blizzard would re-hash this old music to promote new content is there?

Felicia Day music video

Felicia Day, the hot red head from the epic web series The Guild has just launched her first single "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar". The pop song is a sexy and corny taunt at all of us MMO gamers, using funny lyrics that may only be picked up by MMO gamers. It's bound for stardom in the geek realm! Felicia Day first appeared as a potential Slayer in the 7th season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and has since become a cult icon to MMO gamers in The Guild.

Game world vs real world: or should they merge?

Haddock over at the Core Worlds blog has been wondering about what sort of social networking SWTOR will have? Xbox has done a great job integrating Windows Live. He ends his short discussion with the comment:

"Would you like to see a meta-system integration so you can join friends, earn achievements and get information about the game world from the real one?"

Mmmmm ... interesting. At the moment in the MMO world there is a haphazard collection of ways to interact outside the game. There are blogs, with comments; forums; and a few sort of community portals. Some bloggers use Twitter and some guilds make use of Facebook. But there's no smooth way of interacting with your ingame concerns in the cyberspace social networking world. I'd argue that the question is do we want the information about the game connected with the other online world, not the real world!! Although, so many of us live in the online world so much these days that it's certainly "real" enough. Some day a game company will have a smooth integration with social networking and the game. Will SWTOR be that game?

Ripping a Hunters heart out

Finding a Spirit beast can be real hard. With Loque’nahak I spent over 40 in game hours looking for it and I must say that finding it was the best thing ingame I have ever got. Better than any Epic loot mount, etc.

Last night I got a report from a guild member that npc scan went off for Skoll on his way to TOC. I was not far behind and then it happend: I got the message too! It was him! He was there! I had him targeted 45m away and then he goes gray... I get to him and a Blood Elf Pally is on him. I drop a trap and used Distracting shot but the Pally hits him again and... kills him! It ripped my heart out. I was shaking but there was nothing I could do. I was 2 or 3 seconds too late and the BE Pally gave me some awlful greif ...

About 14 months until SWTOR?

The rumor mill is rife with reports that a Lucas Arts insider told a French website that they're aiming for an October 2010 release for SWTOR. Who knows how true this is. There would be at least six months of beta testing before release and we're aiming on being on that list and reporting on the testing. [Source: Starwarsmmo.net]

Crusaders' Coliseum week two: Lord Jaraxxus

Week two in patch 3.2 brings us our 2nd fight in the Crusaders' Coliseum. If you missed our video of the first fight, Northrend Beasts, you can see it on YouTube here. There is a full guide to the fight in the Info tab on YouTube.

Lord Jaraxxus is summoned by Grand Warlock Wilfred Fizzlebang when the gnome attempts to summon a doomguard for the next challenge.

From WoW-Wiki: "Lord Jaraxxus is a fight with relatively simple mechanics, but a lot of damage. Jaraxxus himself should be tanked in the center of the room, and dps should spread out as if for Kel'Thuzad. This is to avoid the chain lightning as much as possible, as this will hit for as much as 15k and arc to 3 people on 10 man regular. Jaraxxus will also periodically cast fireball on the tank, which will hit for 15k, and tick for 6k every second for the next 5 seconds, so this should be dispelled as quickly as possible.

Jaraxxus will periodically spawn portals and volcanoes. Portals will spawn a Mistress of Pain, which must be tanked and burned down as fast as possible, as she will choose a random raid member, apply a Spinning Pain Spike debuff, pick them up and do 10 to 15k physical damage.

Volcanoes will spawn 3-4 infernals, which should be tanked away from Jaraxxus. The infernals have an interruptable AoE which will hit everyone in about a 5 yard radius for 5k. The infernals will also sometimes turn into a floating orb, hover over to a random raid member, and exploding dealing aoe damage in a small radius. Tanks need to pick the infernal up again quickly, or it will start killing raid-members.
Jaraxxus also has a number of debuffs. The most important is Incinerate Flesh, which will be put on a random raid member (possibly an offtank) and which will absorb all healing on that target, till a certain amount of healing has been done, 70k on 10 man regular. This is not too much of a problem, as long as healers react quickly. If the debuff wears off without being healed through, the target will explode, dealing damage in a very large aoe, much like Vezax's flames.

The next debuff is Legion Flames, which will continuously spawn flames under it's target. There are two strategies for dealing with this, either the target can use damage reduction cooldowns and remain stationary, or they can run directly outwards. The idea with not moving is to not spawn as many flames all over the room.

A fire resist aura should be used at all times during Juraxxus, and any amount of passive healing or damage reduction that dps can provide will make the fight go much smoother."

You can look at the Loot Table Abilities and Achievements on MMo Champion.

And here's a video of from the PTR. It's in Germna. I haven't found an English one yet.

Patch not quite all there

Well as we all know by now, patch 3.2.0 went live. Blizzard had no choice but to get the patch out now, one reason being Blizzcon is coming up in two weeks time. If the patch wasn't out at Blizzcon, it would have interfered with what they wanted to talk about. The last thing they would want in their panels would have been questions about a patch. Instead they want to talk about what's coming up next year, not next week. So what they had to do to release the patch this week was to remove features that were on the test server.

One of these features was the in-game quest helper type thing which provided map logos which indicated where quest objectives were, as you can see from the below image.

The new raid instance also only has the first boss available at the moment. There will be five in the long run.

I went out and played around with all the new dailies. I then got roped into a couple of runs in the new 5 man, Trial of the Champion. The two different flavors of Trial of the Champion, heroic and normal, provide epic loot for all drops. The normal mode drops 200 level loot and the heroic mode drops 219 level loot. This is going to provide a brilliant way for characters to geer up. I will be attempting to run these instances on my alt as often as possible.

After some guild activities last night we also took the guild into the Vault of Archavon. We were all excited about seeing the new boss. Unfortunately, the new boss was out of town! Although the new section of the dungeon is there, it's completely empty! Apparently this guy will not be made available until season 7 of Arena ends.

We then headed off to face the first challenge in Trial of the Crusader. After three attempts, the Northrend beasts went down. We then went on to do the same thing in ten man mode and now we're left with the hard versions of both 10 and 25 man.

Add-ons and patch clashes

Since I started playing WoW, it's always been the same ... every time there's a patch the days following are filled with people complaining about this not working, or that not working. Blizzard and/or other companies do make sure that everything they produce is working as planned before a patch is released. Where the problem lies is in add-ons that may or may not improve the gaming experience for the player.

WoW is plagued with add-ons, some of them good, some of them just outright silly. I personally use three or four add-ons. I try to keep it to a minimum as I've experienced many issues, especially around the time of a patch, anything from extremely poor game performance, to constant errors popping up.

The other major issue from add-ons is how to get them ... safely. There is a marketing war on out there about how add-ons should be supplied to customers. wowmatrix is an add-on tool that automatically scans your add-ons, checks their versions and downloads the latest one directly for you. Sites that were providing the downloads got upset with this and started blocking wowmatrix, forcing customers to go to their site.

Now, I wouldn't have a problem with going to sites of other add-ons, if it wasn't for the risk of key-loggers. If I had one gold for every time I heard reports about cursed.com, a popular add-on supplier, having key-loggers on their site, I'd be gold-capped. There are all sorts of warnings popping up on blogs even today, about not going there and advice about how to get around the key-loggers. I'm not too sure whether it's the site itself that has the key-loggers or is it the advertising banners? Unlike a lot of other sites they don't have the security of Google advertising but a lot of their advertising does look legit. But you seriously cannot ignore all the reports.

I still try and use wowmatrix where ever possible. Unfortunately there are one or two add-ons which are blocked.

Should it be the responsibility of the game manufacturer to provide a secure path for add-ons to be downloaded to the community? Blizzard can take any one of these add-ons at any time and turn it into something that is built into their game. In-game calendar for instance was around for a long time before Blizzard implemented it. Needless to say, I would highly advise keeping your add-ons to a minimum and I would also advise extreme caution, no matter where you're downloading your add-ons from.