Editor’s Warning: This post is long. If you don’t like em long you can skip straight to the good stuff here.

I’ve been the acting guild and raid leader for <Specced for Awesome> since the mid-TBC era. We started out as an extremely casual guild and delved headfirst into Karazhan with our motley crew of 10 or so raiders. Most of us had never raided before (that one time where I lolcleansed a ZG pug in vanilla doesn’t count). We dabbled in 5-mans here and there but Kara was that first hit of the hard stuff. We were hooked.

Months later we were clearing the entirety of Kara in one night. So what next? We naturally attempted to jump right in to Zul’Aman where the Amani trolls proceeded to have their way with us. ZA was challenging to say the least. Kara was (and still is) a great instance but it wasn’t really giving us the fix we needed. We really had no choice but to head into Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon’s Keep if we wanted to progress. There was just one problem: we were a 10-man guild and these raids required 25.

So we did what we had to, we upped our recruitment efforts. We recruited pugs from heroics and Kara runs, we advertised in trade, solicited the unguilded and even braved the dreaded realm forums. It took a guild merger/acquisition but we finally got the numbers we needed.

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If you haven’t heard or seen the announcement yet…

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)
She has lurked in her lair and done battle with the many brave adventurers who travelled to that familiar location over the years. Now, in honor of the World of Warcraft 5-year anniversary, the dreaded brood mother Onyxia is being revamped to make a return to the forefront of Azeroth, as part of our big plans for the upcoming 3.2.2 content patch.

This permanent update to Onyxia will convert the dungeon into 10- and 25-player modes. We will be adding new items to Onyxia’s loot table that have the same model as some of the classic loot from this dungeon, like Tier 2 helms, with stats updated to match the current level of content. There will be a special new item too: a normal drake-sized 310% speed flying mount modeled after Onyxia herself called an Onyxia Broodling. We will also be updating the encounter mechanics to be more fitting for modern raiding, but we can guarantee players will get to experience the frightening horror of deep breaths once again.

Then for a limited time, after the 5-year anniversary event officially begins in November, anybody who logs in will receive an Onyxia Brood Whelpling pet.

We’re very excited to bring this classic encounter back to provide a fun new experience for both new and veteran players. Further details will be available in the near future, and we will be setting up the Public Test Realms soon to help test out this fight along with all the new content we have planned for the patch. Keep an eye on the forums for updates!

I never got to experience Onyxia until I was able to 5-man her at level 70 so this is awesome news! The new rewards (woot another Judgement Crown) and the Onyxia Broodling mount are just icing on the cake.

Now based on Zarhyms description and the fact that they’re revamping and retuning the encounter for level 80 leads me to believe that the entire dungeon as it exists in the game right now will cease to exist (a la Naxxramas) Unfortunate news for those old-school raiders that like to relive the glory days. I’m guessing the original achievement will be given the Feat of Strength treatment.

I know this is a special occasion with it being WoW’s 5-year anniversary (have I really been playing this game that long?), but I really hope that they take this approach with some of the other content.

Update: Looks like Bornakk confirmed that the old version will get nyxed.

Dear Blizzard Dev Team,

I’d like to present to you a wish-list of things that I’d like to see in the upcoming expansion:

Race Switch – It seems far fetched but with you already announcing plans to allow faction traversal at some point in the future I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility. You can already change servers, rename your character, change its appearance and even its gender.

The only non-cosmetic difference between the races right now are a handful of racial abilities that continue to be nerfed and homogenized. I could see the human’s diplomacy being an attraction for rep grinding but you could deter opportunists with a super long race-change cooldown. I’d also recommend that they continue to enforce the class restrictions* (ie: you could switch to a Draenei but not a Human if you were currently a Night Elf Hunter).

I really don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t allow this. Plus I secretly wish my pally was a dwarf.

Class Restrictions Begone – I changed my mind. Class restrictions at this point are silly. Lore be damned. There’s no reason why a Tauren dedicated to embracing the darkness shouldn’t be allowed to be a warlock. A human hunter perhaps? Hell, if you’re going to let Blood Elves be paladins, you could let the trolls and the night elves devote themselves to the Light as well.

This is another silly restriction that does nothing to enhance the game at this point. I understand that it might take some extra effort to see this one implemented, such as adding class specific starter quests to other zones (although they did put a shaman trainer outside of Stormwind).

You also made sure every piece of gear works for every class already.

Worgen and Goblin Races – by no means an original concept, but with all the attention to the “leaked” mask situation I really feel like this would be an awesome direction for Bizzard to go in. Entirely feasible and I’d almost be willing to bet gold on it (if it wasn’t against the EULA).

Worgen would naturally make a great Alliance race as we’re really lacking in the beastial department. Horde could also use a smaller race to round out their lineup. As far as classes go, I’m sure we’ll see some typical combos like warrior and rogue on both sides. Not sure about the caster classes for Goblin but at least warlocks seem fitting for the Worgen. Although you could just use my previous suggestion and let us choose any class we want. Worgenadin ftw.

Increased Max on Characters per Realm – I’m sure that quite a few of you have already hit the 10-character max on a realm or two. If Blizzard does end up adding additional races then some of us are going to be making some hard decisions about who gets to stick around when its time to make a wolfman err wolfwoman.

Sortable Character Screen (and more) - I just want to change the order of my characters on the login screen damnit. Who else hates having their bank alt higher on the list than their main? While you’re at it, overhaul the character screen completely. Show me my current talentspec(s), hearth cooldown, rested xp percentage, gold on-hand, unread mail, total time played and time since last logoff. On second thought, forget about those last two.

More multi-passenger mounts – my favorite part of my chopper (and that of many a guildmate) is definitely the sidecar. Two-person flying mounts (rolfcopter 2.0) or even a 5-man siege tank would be awesome. Underwater mounts? How about a multi-person submersible (a la The Life Aquatic)? Talk about a money sink eh? Bah dum tsss!

More Ulduar – Ulduar is a great instance. Sexy aesthetics aside, I love the difficulity. I love the layout. I love the teleporting between sections. I love the perfect amount of trash mobs. Ulduar has eeked out Karazhan as my favorite instance and I hope that there are more Ulduaresque raids to come.

Less mail drops though plx.

Lumberjacking Profession – I’m actually surprised that this isn’t in the game already. Collecting wood is such a staple of Warcraft that it boggles the mind that we haven’t seen this implemented yet. I know I’m not the only one that thinks this would be an awesome idea. Naturally we’d need a woodcrafter profession to go along with it. Staves anyone?

Guild Housing Ships - as cool as a guild hall would be where you could fly your own colors, hire vendors and show off your spoils of war in a trophy case, a freakin pirate ship with the aforementioned would be infinitely cooler. If we are indeed heading out to sea to visit the Maelstrom then this would be a perfect fit.

You probably wouldn’t want everyone and their 3 person guild piloting a massive frigate, but you could setup ship tiers that you could upgrade to. Start out with a dinghy and work your way up to a steam-powered icebreaker. Better yet, let us upgrade to dirigibles with the highest tier being your very own gunship. /drool

A guild ship would definitely be a significant investment. Plus it would give those lumberjacks something to do. Of course I’d have to name ours the Belafonte.

Heroic Old-World Instances - you can’t deny it, the old world instances are dead. Deadmines (no pun intended), still one of the best 5-man dungeons in the game, gets unfortunately passed over by most fledgeling Alliance these days. I’m sure the early Horde instances suffer a similar fate.

The not-so simple solution: set the instance to heroic and bam, your level and gear scale down to meet the dungeon’s intended range. Or put in dungeon-wide aura that removes a percentage of your stats, much like ressurection sickness. Now you can run dungeons with your lowbie friends or their alts and it won’t be a complete joke.

But what’s in it for the senior that’s bringing themselves down to nubville? Besides the experience of revisiting some of the games awesome dungeon content of course? Well, why don’t we let them use tabards to build faction rep? How about letting them gain some sort of mentor rep that can be applied for separate rewards. Orrr, maybe the bosses drop emblems of heirloomism (yeah, I’ made that up) for BtA gear?

You kow you could just throw some mentor achievements in there and go home early.

So Blizzard, I hope that you’ll take some of my ideas into consideration. Please feel free to implement all of the awesome recommendations stated above without any fear of recourse regarding your originality.

Regards,

Jon Roach

Oh yeah, one more thing…

15-man Raids – I’m actually working on an entire separate post letter as to the reason why I think this would be one of the best changes to the game since the addition of dualspec. Keep an eye out for this controversial submission.

When you fight, you fight from behind.

The following applies to anyone who is doing melee damage on a mob or raid boss: unless you are the tank, you want to be behind the mob when you attack.

Why? Because a mob cannot parry (or block) your attacks when you hit it from behind.

That’s awesome right?

Yes it is and here’s why: besides the obvious benefit of increasing your personal DPS because your attacks are actually connecting, a parried attack will reduce the mob’s swing timer (effectively increasing its attack speed).

An easier way to think of it is that a parry on a mob will result in a counterattack. This counterattack is directed at the mob’s target (which should be the tank in most situations). Now the tank has his own parries to worry about and probably doesn’t want someone else buffing the boss.

An unlucky string of parries from the mob, whether caused by the tank or from other melee DPS, can result in some nasty damage spikes, putting unnecessary stress on your healers and increasing the risk of your tank biting the dust.

But wait there’s more. There are plenty of raid bosses out there that have a cleave attack that hits everyone in their frontal arc. You don’t want to be affected by this but it’s easy to avoid: just hit it from behind*.

*Behind means behind. Make sure you’re not on top of the boss as your attacks can technically pass through the mob and be counted as frontal hits.

The only exception to this method is when fighting dragons (tails hurt, attack the hind legs) or mobs with a knock-back that require special positioning.

I need to get back on the Blogroll Spotlight and I’ve also got a sweet addon to share that I actually haven’t seen featured anywhere else.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of theorycrafting on our guild’s message boards so maybe I’ll recycle a post or two to upload here. I mean uhh.. I’ve got some really awesome stuff I’ve been working on just for you guys.

Stay tuned.

In my defense, I didn’t wipe the raid until after Aran was already down. Stupid flame wreath.

A few days ago I switched my Paladin from Ret to Prot, as 66 seemed to be the level of choice to do so. Now I’m happily tanking. I’ve noticed that sometimes I have to drop defense gear so that I take enough damage, and in one fight I considered getting my 2h sword out again, just so that the hits would hurt more.

These were 60-62 instances – so is that pretty normal if you’re doing a lower instance. eg. At 70 will I be doing the same in the 68-69 Instances?

As I was writing my response in the comments I figured I’d go ahead and make it a full-fledged post.

Paladins are a unique breed in that our rage bar just happens to be blue. We use our mana to generate threat and provide other utility like our taunt and the occasional hammer-stun. When we tank, we rely on our healers to provide a healthy stream of mana by way of our passive Spiritual Attunement.

For every heal that we successfully receive, SA rewards us with 10% (at level 66) of the healed amount in mana with one very important caveat: if we’re at full health, we get no mana. This can be extremely problematic as in Nathan’s situation where one isn’t actually losing enough health to keep their mana levels up.

I often joke about taking my gear off as we run through 5-man trash as I burn through mana at an extremely fast pace but stay relatively topped off in the health department due to my superior defense. What you will find as you progress through content as a tanking pally is that you will need to acquire (and keep with you at all times) at least 2 (if not more) sets of gear.

The first set is probably closest to what you’ve acquired thus far if you’re new to the prot scene and that is high spell dmg, high int, mp5 gear. These pieces will come in handy when burning through instance trash, and even on some boss battles that favor staying power over damage reduction. If you’re still not taking enough damage, feel free to slip into some caster cloth or pull out the ole’ zweihander.

The second set is what you will be working on for raid content with a focus on tanking stats. Get yourself to 490 defense to become virtually uncrittable and work on 102.4% for uncrushability. With these goals in mind, you will still probably want to hang on to most any tanking piece you come across as different stats will be better suited for different scenarios. Some gear will have have a focus on mitigation (reducing the damage taken) while other items will provide more stamina (allowing you to take more damage) or avoidance (not taking any damage at all). Which stat to build over the other is still a topic of huge debate among players. My preferred solution is to have them all and switch them out as needed.

So to answer your question Andrew, yes, it is entirely normal and you will still be tweaking your equipment on the fly throughout runs at 70 in not only the dungeons but I can only assume well into the raid progression as well. With so many different encounter types, increasing the ability to excel at your role by adjusting your stats through gear is crucial to the success of any player, especially the tank.

This post apparently attracted quite a few elitist raiders that had a negative reaction to Tobold’s gripe. He made an excellent riposte with Invaded by raiders that delves deeper into his interpretation of the raider mentality and Blizzards decision to cater to it almost entirely.

A lot of what Tobold says mirrors my own thoughts. As much as I’d love to experience end-game content, it’s just not practical for someone who can’t dedicate a significant amount of uninterrupted time to the required gearing up process. I enjoy running instances, but running the same instance in a “heroic” flavor (no change in the encounter, just the stats of the mobs) multiple times does not appeal to me in the least. The only instance that I can really withstand running more than once per character is the Deadmines. (Heroic Deadmines maybe?).

I think I might understand Blizzard’s thought process though. They focus a lot of initial energy into developing the primary game (or expansion) content and once the game is released, all efforts are shifted to keeping that Carrot on a Stick dangling just out of reach of the top players. Why do this? Because you don’t want the top players to leave, either by “winning” the game and completing all of the content, or by hitting a rough patch were progression seems impossible or not worth it. When the end-game isn’t appealing to the top players, you will have a trickle-down effect that will instill apathy in even the most casual of players.

This reasoning is a shot in the dark, I’d love to be a fly on the wall in some of Blizzards Top Secret planning meetings. Regardless, I think that the paradigm needs to shift to a casualcore player focus. Release new content that will actually be seen by a majority of your player-base. 2.3 was a step in the right direction (new midlevel-zone content makes an alt-aholic like myself very happy). Existing instance refreshment seems also like a logical choice. How many people have had the opportunity to experience Blackwing Lair or even Molten Core? Even the level 60 5-man content is bypassed at 58 for superior quests and rewards in Outland.

It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds. Will WotLK turn Outland into the new Azeroth–a veritable ghost-town with the occasional alt scrambling through on their way to the top? Will we ever see a major content patch or even an expansion that focuses on revamping the old-world? Regretfully, I’m a frayed knot.