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.

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.

1. Tonberry (Shadow priest)
2. Flaps (Arms Warrior)
3. Tweat (Healer priest)

I’ll post the link tomorrow as soon as it’s up – we should be starting as usual around 16:00 server time (CET), which is 15:00 GMT/UTC.  Although we often start these raids a few minutes late.  Be sure to tune in so you can either be there when we kill insanity for the 4th week in a row or take the piss when we inevitably crumble under the pressure and fuck it all up

I’d love to be on that streaming list above too, but unfortunately I live in a fucking backward country where the best upload speed I can hope to get, while not living inside a major metropolis, would be woefully inadequate to live stream without game lag.

It’s a bit off topic but some of you might have seen stuff about the new ‘Digital Britain‘ law details being published recently which was designed as a package of measures to boost digital industry in the UK.  But apparently it’s far more important to stomp all over anyone who might dare to download a TV show than to produce legislation to boost our, quite frankly dire, digital infrastructure.  While you have forward thinking countries like Sweden, Norway and Spain making (or considering making) it a legal requirement for it’s citizens to have access to greater broadband connectivity and capacity – we in the UK are still mostly using Victorian era telephone wiring.  Pretty disgusting that the country which was the birthplace for most of the modern telecommunication inventions (along with the world wide web itself) which make it possible for the internet to exist as it does today can barely offer 1/3 of it’s citizens >2mbit connection speeds. No, no it’s much more important that we disconnect people sharing that episode of top gear in a guilty until proven innocent process run by the content rights holders themselves.  Luckily some people are fighting back on this, these people will be known to all as ‘the ones with common sense’.  The fact that the guy spearheading this abolition of cyber civil rights isn’t even a fucking elected official – but just appointed into government having previously been forced to resign more than once for being part of scandal – leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Once 3.3 does get a bit nearer you can expect a lot more here, along with videos of kills as and when they happen.

There’s been a bit of discussion internally in Apex about releasing videos. There used to be an unwritten rule that many top guilds stuck to which essentially stated that guilds wouldn’t release full videos of new live fights before the top10 kills were decided.  However the advent of different modes within a fight has diluted this quite a bit and it seems that no one really follows it any more.  Right now whoever gets the first video of a new fight’s kill on youtube the fastest, gets all the e-fame on mmo-champ and other sites.  So it seems that’s what people are now going for and so will we.

Until then here’s a screenshot of Geoph gaining a well deserved Insanity achievement last week: