Whether you believe Ensidia or not seems to be largely related to if you are European or an Americunt.

Either way there are more pressing matters to discuss which not many people have picked up upon.   What are these issues which are more important than top-end guild ban dramas?  Simple:  It’s too easy to gear alts.

No I’m not talking about ’scrubs’ getting gear for completing join-the-dots level difficulty encounters.  I’m talking about how good players, decent players like you and me, inevitably end up filling the lack of raid time in the week with the creation of more and more alts.  This wasn’t such a problem back in the day when it took a long time to get to levelcap, as most of the time was spent leveling the alt up to 80 only to come to the realization that you couldn’t get any decent gear on it for shit because you couldn’t even get heroic groups.   But now, all you have to do is type in the name of your character and you’re practically at level cap within a day.  Couple with that the relative ease of getting gear on your new level 80 the problem becomes more realistic.

Now I’ve probably lost you.  What is the problem with being able to gear up alts nicely in 3.3?  Well you may ask, because not so long ago I was even rejoicing at the fact that my warrior, shadowpriest, deathknight, hunter, paladin, rogue.. …. would soon be decked in 232.  And therein lies the problem.  The cycle has changed to allow you to gear but the inevitable conclusion to gearing an alt with the best gear you can get from heroics/pugs is that where do you go then?  The only answer is raiding.

This in itself isn’t new – hardcore players have been running alt raids for a long time.  Usually only 1 alt per person though, players would raid on a main and then their alt every week.  Few players had more than 1 alt that they raided on, but that has now changed from the combination of 3.3 (specifically dungeon queue system) making it easy to gear up other wise forgotten level 80s.  Raiding on 3 or more chars a week has the following consequences.  Either the player has a lot of spare time and embraces the extra play time and learns more class abilities and becomes more versitile.  OR: he/she comes to one solid realization that none of these characters are likely to ever see anything like BiS gear setups before the new Expansion hits, at which time the gear will become worthless anyway.  Added to the issue of raiding the same dungeons 2x per character per week …  Sure the realization requires something who thinks cynically and in the long term more than the short term – but even for the most ADHD addled player there will be the nagging doubt in their mind.

If you do come to the latter conclusion, the future only holds distraction and boredom with the game in general.  Such boredom may well infect your desire to gear your main character too – which can prove fatal.  All that is required next is something to happen in real life which requires you to take a few days away from the game, may be you miss 1 raid at a crucial point and that’s it.

You’re done until the expansion hits.

Annoyingly this video isn’t a full kill as it only starts at 50%, but since its the first uploaded video of a live kill (not ptr) of a new boss I think it deserves a mention. Oh yeah and the music really sucks, I’d put it on mute if you don’t want to rupture your ears.

NOTE: This isn’t an Apex kill – quite obvious when you think about it since the patch hasnt even gone live in euro yet – but since I already had one complaint…. Another obvious hint to it not being an Apex video is the seriously bad music choice.

Watch in High Quality and preferably in widescreen / fullscreen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7v2y6cYrJk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzCB6HMC6Kg

As always, since you can’t embed the HD versions automatically from youtube anymore – make sure you click the hd button. Better yet, click the link below the player to view it on youtube directly so you can put it into widescreen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJsbL2p4FNo

Apparently that’s a load of Betty Swollocks though, as pointed out in this blue post: (source)

Just as a point of clarification. The Professor Putricide encounter is working as intended. You are only allowed one abomination up at any given time in both 10 player and 25 player modes.

And to prove it really isn’t bugged we have at least 1 kill reported by wowprogress.com for Paragon.

Go Finland!

Edit: Their video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8WSshUGBhk

We ran a 2 healer setup as standard with an enhancement shaman who had resto dualspec just in case.  I would recommend that running a 3 healer setup will save some headache on all 3 of the new bosses.  In the end the only boss we swapped in the extra healer for was Putricide himself, however there is no issue with DPS on the other two and it was touch and go with 2 healers having not done those fights before.

Rotface was quite a bit harder than Festergut, but I think this could mainly be because we didn’t really quite know what to do having only a few people in the group on PTR previously.  As a result a fair bit of the fight could have been easier but we kind of brute-forced some things, like just healing through certain damage which could actually be avoided.

Festergut however was pretty much a faceroll, if you’re wondering which one you should go for first in order of progression I’d definitely say GO LEFT before going right.  Not only is Festergut easier, but there is also less damage flying around once you get some spores popped, tank damage is pretty high but raid damage is a lot lower than Rotface.  Again two healers worked pretty well for us here but I’d take three for safety in future, as there shouldn’t be much danger of getting an enrage if you lose 1 dps.

The LEFT side (Festergut) being easier is also compounded by his dog ‘Stinky’ also being easier than ‘Precious’ (marginally).

I’m just uploading the video of our 10 man Putricide kill right now which I’ll post here asap for anyone who’s interested.

Yeah, before that.

I’ve got to say that I’m enjoying the random heroic system, mainly because I play characters who have their main spec as either healing or tanking, or if they are dps then they probably _can_ tank or heal.  (If you’re just a solo dps char like a warlock, hunter or rogue I’m sure you  are loving the 15 min queues).  I’m making good use of it right now, since Blizz has deemed it fit to reduce DK tanks into a laughable subset of tanking only fit for flame wars between guilds.  “Lol that guild is so bad they actually have a DK maintank ROFL” and etc. I basically stopped playing my DK tank, because it’s shit now, and re-geared my dps warrior as a tank, the process of which took about 6 hours from zero tanking gear to full 232 set, 232 wep, 245 bracers and rings and sitting pretty at a reasonably respectable 35k hp unbuffed.  Got some way to go, shit trinkets and a shit ring along with a shit shield – but not far off, and it was pretty funny how at least in heroics my new tonk-warrior was doing way more threat than my DK can ever do, even with a PERFECT cycle, just by pretty much spamming 3 buttons all the time with an initial shockwave per pack.  But that’s another rant for another day. So yeah, from the perspective of alt gearing I do like the random dungeons.  In fact I really like them, there’s not much wrong with the idea and for once I find myself sitting with the Devs – even if they are usually a bunch of useless pricks.

However – as is so often the case in these modern days of increasing obesity in the young generation – there is a big fat BUT(T) that comes crushing down on everyone’s good times.  The “But” in question here is the issue of instant-dungeon porting.  Wait isn’t that a good thing? No longer having to fly all the way to far flung dungeons like The Oculus.  Well, you might be fooled at first into thinking so, however after a few days of it you begin to realise that this feature has pretty massive game-changing consequences.

Once the novelty wears off you realise that with instant porting what exactly is the point of having a game world at all?  People don’t fly to dungeons any more and suddenly you realise the only reasons to actually venture outside a major city of your choice is to do daily quests or fly to a raid (and how long will that remain?).  Just like that world pvp @ dungeon portals is removed, any sense of size in the world is reduced significantly because of not having to take time to travel and we all might as well be playing Guild Wars.  I’d be willing to bet 1/2 the people who’ve completed the trio of new Icecrown 5 mans haven’t even seen what the outside area looks like at all and don’t know how to get there – unless they wiped a few times.

One of the other major issues is with cross-realm players.  Again, at first this is awesome – your healer decides to fuck off or disconnect for ages so you can suddenly automatically find a replacement within minutes rather than the group usually breaking up as happened before.  However, do a few more heroics and you realise that actually this benefit is far outweighed by the fact that people in full-xrealm groups where no one is from their server are FAR more likely to be pricks to everyone.  And by being pricks I mean doing things like leaving a group as soon as the boss they needed loot from has died, rolling need on stuff that they cant even use or whatever and no one having any recourse.  And my most favourite one, /follow someone and /afk for 15 minutes – YOU CANT EVEN KICK THESE FUCKERS.  They literally just run around collecting badges for the bosses you kill and you cant kick them for 15 minutes or some crap it’s total horse shit.

Right now you’re either agreeing with me or thinking that you’ve been pretty lucky and not seen any of the above mentioned issues with the system.  Well there’s one further issue which I can pretty much guarantee you will have seen.  In fact I believe it’s so common that it has allowed me to reverse-engineer the algorithm for how the system finds you a dungeon for your daily 2x frost badges.  This algorithm is shown below in pseudocode:

if (playerName == "Cows" && randomDungeonsCompletedToday < 1) then
  chanceOfOculus = "High";
  numLowGearedXRealmDPS = 3;
  tankGearLevel = "Low";
  tankInteligenceLevel = "Labotomized Gibbon";
fi

Icecrown is gated…

Yeah, so the rumour mill is that it’s gated and it might even be longer than a week between each ‘gate’ open. So I’m thinking, what’s the point in taking time off around patch release? Pretty much none right? Because hardmodes wont even be active for like a month or more so the only thing I’d gain is a few badges (YES BADGES NOT EMBLEMS) from normal modes and a bit of normal mode loot. And quite frankly I can get both of those at the weekend anyway…

Since my situation will probably change in January and I’ll be able to raid hardcore again, I’m actually pretty happy about this. Yeah that right, I’m happy that Icecrown is gated. Not because the artificial drawing out of content which isn’t designed to last the time it’s meant to last is a good idea. It’s not, it’s a fucking lazy shit idea. But because right now, it means that the actual competition in Icecrown probably won’t start hotting up until January at the earliest (since no one gives a shit about normal modes – likely there will only be points for normal mode full clear) – which is great for me.

So yeah, Vive la Gated.

On a secondary note: what the fuck is this bullshit with gearscore suddenly? As I’ve only been playing on weekends recently, due to work, I think I’ve seen this as a more sudden change than most people. 6 weeks ago no one on Al’Akir was using gearscore, very few people knew what it was or had an addon for it, some had heard of it by reading US forums and hearing the whine there. So yeah it’s totally fantastic that now this disease seems to have crossed the atlantic and infected our precious Parisian server farm. Within a few short weeks every trade pug had gone from “Link Archiv [sic]” to “LFG Wailing caverns 5k gearscore minimum”.

You might wonder why I give a shit, since 3 out of 5 of my level 80s have over 5k anyway. Well it’s not really about that, it’s about the whole idea that people over-inflate the already inflated gear with regards to what instances you can do with it.  For example, requiring gearscores of 4k+ to do fucking heroics is a complete joke, how the hell are people supposed to gear up when they can’t even get groups for heroics.  Heroics being fucking stupidly easy to do in just-dinged blue gear.

Although really the gearscore / link achiev problem is not as bad as you might think from reading the forums.  As anyone knows who’s played wow for longer than 1 expansion timeframe, when the expansion comes pretty much everyone is set back to square 0 in their gear.  Thats why a new expansion launch is one of the best times to level up a new character, or to start playing again (and many do) because everyone is suddenly thrust into the same boat of having crappy gear.  And it feels good.

Edit: Streams are now over, thanks for the ~150 people who tuned in.  Bit of panic on Anub’arak but still got the 50

Streams are available here: http://apex.pri.ee/

We’re gathering atm, raid should start a few mins past 16:00 (15:00)