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News Round Up: Dragon Soul Nerfs Continue and so do MoP Talent Explanations
Dragon Soul is receiving what will be the second of its zone wide nerfs, decreasing the damage dealt and health of its enemies by 10% from 5%.
There has been some retaliation from players, but it's always good to remember that the last thing Blizzard wants is another situation like the original Naxxaramas--it is their company goal now to have the majority of its playerbase experience the encounters and this is their method of doing it. Besides, it's not like it's a surprise now, is it?
In other news, we have our recent giveaway winners to announce. We have a bunch because I went on a giveaway spree last week. I'm sorry, I won't do it again!
However, our friends at WoWInterface are holding a
raffle this week
--check it out if you like
Party G.R.E.N.A.D.E.
and
Papa Hummel's Old-Fashioned Pet Biscuit
!
Giveaway Winners
Mount Giveaway Winners
Heart of the Aspects
Mount and 4 AMPM Cups
Heart of the Aspects
Mount
soleless
Umbra000
[td align=c
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Patch 4.3.2 Live Today
It has taken its time, but 4.3.2 is finally hitting servers this week!
A controversial patch, this one introduces gradually scaling zone buffs to
Dragon Soul
that recall back to the ones Icecrown Citadel had--a 5% buff will be added to the instance for raids who which to take advantage of it. There are also several encounter specific nerfs that aim to allow different raid compositions for the instance's final heroic modes and several class balance tweaks.
As Blizzard has said prior
, this will be the last patch of Cataclysm before a pre-Mists of Pandaria world event, so this patch also marks the beginning of the end for this expansion!
<div xmlns="
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
class="detail"><p>During the scheduled server maintenance on the week of January 31, the Dragon Soul raid will become enveloped by the “Power of the Aspects” spell, reducing the health and damage dealt of all enemies in the raid by 5%. This spell will grow progressively stronger over time to reduce the difficulty and make
Live
News Round Up: Mists of Pandaria, Dragon Soul Nerfs, and Giveaway Winners
The results are finally in from our
New Year's resolution giveaway
--join me in congratulating the winners! Perculia and I read a lot of your resolutions and really found them entertaining so thanks for that! I will be emailing the prize codes on Friday, so be sure to have an updated email address if you are one of the winners--also make sure to check your spam if you don't get one by tomorrow afternoon PDT.
We've also included some round up posts, mostly responding to the
difficulty changes for Dragon Soul
announced last night as well as hints to a future Q&A session with Blizzard developers.
Giveaway Winners
Wooly White Rhino
Mount
D.I.S.C.O.
Ball
Contay
inkdrgn
genghismantastic
adraunn
Nathanyel
[/
Live
Hotfixes (December 6th - 12th)
This is major--huge heroic nerfs are coming for tomorrow's clear (we earlier said right now, but Blizzard updated me on this). As someone who has just put 150+ wipes into heroic Yor'sahj 25-man and had a 900,000 wipe a few seconds ago, I can say this is actually a good thing. He's a really frustrating fight as well as much easier in 10-man comparatively, so hotfixes will help tune it better.
<p><strong>December 12</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Classes
<ul>
<li>Druid
<ul>
<li>Pounce should now apply its Bleed to targets beyond its normal range when used with the Glyph of Pounce.</li>
<li>The Mass Regeneration effect from the druid tier 13 bonus now heals 25% of the healing received by the druid from Frenzied Regeneration, down from 50%. The tooltip will be updated in a later patch.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Paladin
<ul>
<li>Holy Radiance should now stack properly with other paladins' Holy Radiance, with all valid targets nearby being properly healed.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Warrior
<ul>
<li>
<p>Bladestorm will now properly apply its immunities to spell effects that are in flight when Bladestorm is activated.<br />
 </p>
Live
Nimble Fingers: A Guide to Acquiring Fangs of the Father
Rogues get a new legendary set in 4.3--perhaps to deal with all the melee balance problems in Firelands! Like the means of acquiring
Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest
, rogues will obtain this legendary through a series of quests interspersed with looting items from raid encounters. While completing the entire quest series does require a raid, there's a ton of great solo content at the start, such as exciting high-stakes stealth missions.
For background: check out the quest series in Badlands covering Rheastrasza, the ambitious red dragon who acquired a black dragon egg and magically purified it, cleansing it of the Black Dragonflight’s corruption. This questline covers the fate of the purified egg and introduces the enigmatic Black Prince, Wrathion--in a storyline taking the enterprising rogue to Dragon Soul, Karazhan, Ravenholdt Manor, and much more in the process.
In this guide, I've provided a list of all the quests--their objectives, dialogue descriptions, and relevant notes and tips to help you get through each step faster! Maybe you've got a fresh 85 rogue alt and are wondering how far you can get with solo questing, or raid only a semi-regular basis and want to know how long each raiding step will take.
Pathal has written an excellent in-
Live
4.3 Looking for Raid Exploits Lead to Multiple Bans in Top Guilds
Every patch has its bugs and 4.3 was no exception apparently.
When 4.3 hit last week, the Looking for Raid feature brought joy to many pugs and now it's also now bringing misery to quite a few hardcore guilds. As it turns out, there was a loot bug with the LFR system and master looting. Instead of reporting them, however, most people chose to exploit it to keep their competitive edges.
Members of many top guilds in the world such as Paragon and Method
queued up multiple times through a loophole that allowed players to get loot for more than one run in a row. While LFR is supposed to limit players to be eligible for loot only their first run through, regardless of whether they loot or not, this loophole allowed them to farm for early tier 13 bonuses to give them that extra boost in PvE content.
The end result? Many players opened their emails to find themselves with an 8 day ban, just in time for the holidays--and progression farming. Heroics unlock this Tuesday and this was going to be the last epic push for progression hardcore raiders before Mists of Pandaria. Now many of these guilds now have entire rosters banned, along with
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Dragon Soul: A Guide to Gearing up in 4.3
4.3 launched this week; it's time for another guide to gearing up in a new patch. As usual, this guide does not aim to provide a BiS set of heroic Dragon Soul gear for each class and spec; rather it analyzes the new loot in the context of current options for several different playstyles.
There's two notable new ways to acquire gear: Looking for Raid and expanded Valor Point loot tables.
Looking for Raid:
Players can now queue up as a group or by themselves to join a 25-man raid. These raids will not have a lockout and they will drop tier 13, although the stats will be lower than a normal or heroic 25-man. The LFR system operates much like the current dungeon finder and even minimizes the raid itself, splitting it in half, so players can only queue for half of an instance at a time. Players need a minimum ilvl of 372 to be eligible to queue.
Valor Points:
While players cannot purchase Tier 13 pieces with Valor Points, the vendors sell ilvl 397 items for practically every slot. Those that aren't covered by points are covered with new BoE craftables. The idea is to have Valor Point gearing become an alternative path to normal-mode gearing.
This guide covers the following types of loot:
[
Live
News Round Up: 4.3 Patch Posts
The biggest news here probably isn't the raid finder or the other tidbits, though those are all helpful--instead it's that they nerfed heroic Ragnaros yet again. There's no more geyser in phase four, which was ultimately the definitive deciding factor into a guild that killed it and a guild that didn't. Geyser was unforgiving, instantly wiping the raid for a player being a mere inch too close to another group; this is a huge nerf, so expect tons of people to go back to finish it (and maybe for loot and mounts!).
Raid Finder Tips
I think rather than making this a complaint thread about what people aren't doing, it may be helpful (as the OP started doing) to share some tips for people who maybe haven't ever had a chance to raid before, including what sorts of gear or items they should expect to bring or even the types of buffs they should be ready to apply etc.
What are the types of things anyone should do to be prepared to Raid?
What types of items should they have ready to use in their bags?
Should they bring extra to share or is it every man/woman for themselves?
What are the best sort of buffs, spells, or even abilities that shou
Live
4.3 Raid Finder Loot Rules and Blizzard Preview Footage
Blizzard posted the final raid finder loot rules--a topic I remember many of you were curious about! It looks fairly standard and hopefully will prevent loot being taken unfairly by players who want to grief or gear their offspec over main.
We were also sent a 4.3 video today showcasing Dragon Soul and the three new 5-mans. However, it doesn't have music, so we'll update links if Blizzard's YouTube channel ends up having a different one; we were sent this by Blizzard's PR team and told to post away, but it doesn't seem to be the usual quality for a trailer. Still, it features gorgeous footage and really highlights the instances.
4.3 Raid Finder Loot Rules
As previously announced the Raid Finder will use an altered version of Need Before Greed that provides loot roll bonuses to those that have entered the raid in the role (tank, DPS, healing) that uses those items. Unfortunately the system is currently unable to detect spec, and so this creates some issues for classes that utilize stats that are not "common" to that role.
To help clarify which items you will or will not be able to roll on based on the role you entered the raid i
Live
Deathwing Kill Video, News Round Up, Contest Winners, and 4.3 PTR Changes
A pretty big news round up day, as we have a lot of news to share plus fun things like contest winners and our Deathwing kill video.
First and foremost, however, we have a job opening at Wowhead. It's always a huge honor to bring someone aboard our team and this time is no different. ZAM is growing and we've found ourselves in need of a
Java Developer
. If you have a lot of experience and know how to code, as well as have a strong passion for video games, you should look us up;
after reading the requirements
, just send your salary history and resume to
jobs@cuckhead.com
if you're interested.
We're looking for a new Java Developer here at Wowhead
.
Deathwing Kill Video
I made this a few days ago for Tankspot--it's just me killing Deathwing on the final encounter of Dragon Soul from this week's PTR. I realized I never shared it, though!
A few words on the fight: first off, it's really fun. It looks boring when you see a video, because it's just generally boring to watch videos anyway; the gist of the fight is that you gain buffs, you have to dynamically jump to the platform
Live
4.3 Preview: Yor'sahj the Unsleeping and Ultraxion Dragon Soul Coverage
We have a long weekend coming; BlizzCon is finally here and our
huge party
is about to go down. But today I was able to hop on the PTR to test and kill Yor'sahj the Unsleeping and Ultraxion on 25-player mode! They are fairly easy fights, just how a normal 25-man fight should be. I imagine that Yor'sahj in particular will be incredibly tough on heroic as some of his combinations were hard even on normal.
Live
4.3 Preview: Well of Eternity Overview and Dragon Soul Testing
Blizzard hit us with an unexpected testing phase this afternoon of the new raid as well as the final 5-man; unfortunately, the raid was announced right as the bosses went live, so the servers started tanking immediately while everyone rushed to log on. Only a few groups got a 10-man together--most top-end guilds fought the loading screen boss instead, getting 4-5 of their members in the instance before testing time ran out. We managed to get in and take some screenshots, but sadly, the majority of my guild was stuck at the loading bar for the entire night.
All of this is to say I doubt we'll see many good videos, as the streams were fairly disappointing due to guilds like Blood Legion only able to pull trash due to limited numbers--most videos will probably be PUG point of views.
A rocky start, but hopefully we'll have some great testing sessions before and after BlizzCon!
Here are our other 5-man related previews
:
End Time Preview
Hour of Twilight Pre
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