Holyssa

First off: very good job on finally sending Anub'arak (25) to spider heaven! Spider pride >8< Second: I'm posting links to Yogg strats again. This is merely for our replacements/new faces, because as Uggy stated: this is a B*TCH to explain verbally without eating precious raid time. The above is Zu's portal assignment pic. The old post has the names of folks that are no longer with us (*COUGH*Heiliger*COUGH), so I rescued it from the old thread for him to list assignments again. Bosskillers: http://www.bosskillers.com/cgi-bin/bbguild...mp;guide_id=688 TankSpot: http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f206/49663-...yogg-saron.html ^ Will need a decent connection for this one. LOTS of movies, and notes from StratFu. Wowwiki: http://www.wowwiki.com/Yogg-Saron_(tactics) Guess what? More movies (scroll way down). Also lists the history of nerfs/buffs/changes the multi-mouthed one underwent over time. Wowhead Entry: http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=33288 More or less a condensed version of the Wowwiki link. Comments are useless, unless you wanna read some decent lore/non-tactical theorycrafting. ^ You laugh, you lose. Real life Yogg-Saron footage!

The Brood Mother of the Black flight dared to challenge the Horde a second time. Revenge is a dish best served cold, folks...and what better way to quell all those Deep Breaths with a bit of dragon slaying? Congratulations Crushers!!

I'm guessing Blizzard did this to counter the launch of Aion this week. It's no Icecrown Citadel, but it's enough to make the old-school WoW folk very excited and give them something "new" to farm. Oh, hotfix fun:

Like a bad Dragonball Z villain, Onyxia returns! The patch isn't very large in terms of file size, but there's a lot of neat content (pets, Super Ony, new gear, class changes, etc). Mirrors: http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors

This was to be a night away from colosseums, Old Gods, and crazed Scourge. Kailand and his rowdy team looked to the dwelling beneath Wyrmrest, seeking a rematch with the furious Twilight Drakes. We got it, and as a result? We got even! Congrats to all, and grats Holyssa on winning the first of what is hopefully many drakes for our team!

*pulls herself from the pile of dead Immortal Guardians* Woogah! 10-man or not, this is still a feat to be happy about. *falls down dead after all that crazy tanking* BRB, hospital. x_x

http://www.blizzard.com/store/search.xml?q=authenticator ^ The best $6.50 (not counting S&H lol) you'll ever spend. As tedious as having a 3rd login prompt can be, it'll provide an extra sense of security. Blizzard should just buck up & toss one in every Battle Chest/Cataclysm/etc box. There's also the Mobile authenticators for iPhone/iPod Touch, but I cannot vouch for them since I own neither.

Now, if he were a PROT pally, he'd run around using Avenger's Shield with the school lunch trays, and casting Hammer of the Righteous with a spoon. If he were a Holy pally, he'd just shine a flashlight on 'em and toss bacon at everyone. Kids these days!

Sooooo...Holy played mad scientist, tried out this new thing, and decided to share the results. Took my ol' human main from moons long ago, and made it a Hordie. I began the process at 6:00AM EST, and finally got the email to unlock her around 6:45PM, despite the confirmation page saying the process may take "several days". Perhaps the news has not circulated enough yet, and the line isn't all that big. Wow. The new gnome-brains diet really worked! Her thighs have never looked better. But I digress. So far, it seems to have been picture perfect in the conversion process. Although I did notice a few (minor) nuisances: - Argent Tournament progress gets wiped (Blizzard stated this already...but my mage never did that stuff, so I didn't panic). Maybe they will fix this once they find a programmer insane enough to convert all that crap - Some items based on faction achievements got duplicated. For example: the Black War Bear from For the Horde/Alliance. It probably counts the achievement twice as it switches the Faction Leader kill credit. - Certain items from Alliance-only quests survive the change. Junglewalker Sandals were sitting in my bank much to my surprise, considering it's a boot model unavailable to Horde by normal means. Maybe other items like Dartol's Rod will convert, since it's a quest item that can be kept even if you abandon the chain? - Some mount conversions may not be perfect. I know for a fact that Uly had a yellow Qiraji Battle Tank, because my raid lead at the time pre-assigned us all colors till 40 people each had a bug. This morning, I was welcomed by a GREEN one O_o - You keep "classic" PvP titles. Ever wanted to see a High Warlord Blood Elf or Grand Marshal squidface? Keep your eyes peeled around towns (although it's definitely not me, as I'm only a Senior Sergeant lol)! - Faction specific quest progress got wiped CLEAN. Ulyssa (as a human) had the Northrend quest achievements for all zones except Icecrown. I flew into Howling Fjord last night to find countless yellow "!" icons. What does this mean? A L80 Alliance character can milk Northrend clean of quests from 70 -> 80, convert, then do all the Horde ones from 70 -> 80 for a farkton of gold, not to mention greens that can be sold or DE'd for free dust. Then there's also the nice boost in Horde Expedition faction from this, as well as overall quests done for the 3k quest achievement. Very nifty, and I'm sure gold farmers will find a way to exploit this soon enough... Overall, Blizzard seems to have done their homework with the Faction Change system, despite it coming out unusually quick. I honestly expected this to hit circa 3.2.2 given how complicated it seemed. Bravo, code monkeys!

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...81652&sid=1 Obviously, you need to log in with your WoW account/authenticator to see the Faction Change page. And one monster-sized FAQ: For a list of stuff that gets converted (mounts, etc), see this list: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faction-change/index.xml Note that it may not be complete...though it appears very thorough. I can't imagine how much their code monkeys had to go through to get the kinks out of all this crap. Maybe NOW they can dedicate more energy into un-borking instance servers!

Azjol'nerub was merely a setback! Grats guys! ((pic sucks, but I was in a rush lol))

Not all are stuns/interrupts, but.. Bats (Sonic Blast, 2 second stun) Ravager (Ravage, 2 second stun) Owls/Birds of Prey (Snatch, a 6 second disarm. Might help on the warrior/pally/DK) Nether Ray (Nether Shock interrupt) I got most of these from http://www.wow-petopia.com/html/skills/skills.html, which is bound to have a few more ideas.

Been doing some reading on the Faction Champs. For Science and Tankspot has a short thread with tips, but I picked out some tips/reminders we can keep in mind for later: - Dispell EVERYTHING. Not sure if our locks had them out among the madness, but a Felhound may be of use here seeing as it's a pseudo-PvP fight. - If we go with the burn 1 healer at a time strat (usually the druid): Keep any and all interrupters on the other two at all times, saving stuns and abilities for when spells are about to be cast. Much like Reliquary and Vezax, interrupters need to communicate when cooldowns are up. Even Cyclone will be of use here..anything to lock down the free healers. Putting all our eggs into one basket/assigning them to one target will just leave other mobs free to wreak havoc. - Any NPC that can dispell WILL dispell. Even my judgements got picked off at random it seems. With that in mind, would it be worth keeping Unstable Affliction on the main burn target only? - Confuse enemies with multi-target powers/summons. Army of the Dead, Snake trap, and Mirror Images come to mind, and while they last mere seconds against such strong foes, it buys healers time. - Killing pet classes (hunter/warlock) will NOT despawn pets. Some strats suggest killing pets FIRST due to their low HP and general annoyance factor. The hunter "cat" generally has less HP than the felpuppy. - If need be, assign 1 warlock to perma lock-down the tree via juggling Fear/Banish casts. Keep an eye out for Tremor totems: if Fear isnt working even long before diminishes, there's probably one on the field somewhere. - When in doubt? Fear bomb! - Little strat a deep-frost mage tried to keep the pally/warrior/DK on lock-down. English obviously isn't this guy's first language, but...: - The paladins will cast Hand of Protection on a champion when they have around 30% health. And much like a real pally, they WILL bubble-heal themselves at low life. Priests, beware! - Kill totems asap. Windfury nearly pwned Holy's face a few times when the warrior suddenly became my new best friend. - Assign tanks to specific mobs for kiting/stunning/"peeling" duty. Placing Hand of Protection on focus targets will scatter/confuse some NPCs, but keep moving in case they decide to turn around and whack the poor clothie nearby. - Another poster on Tankspot posted this very nice cheat-sheet on locking down an NPC: You may have your own methods for tracking DR if you don't want to get that mod. Speaking of diminishing returns... - From the For Science site:

Season 6 is about to end, and Season 7 will be starting up. "But Holy, Arena is teh suck!" Perhaps. But there's one other reason to look forward to: http://www.wowwiki.com/Koralon_the_Flame_Watcher Ignis's palette-swap pal in the Vault's west tunnel will be up soon for T9 lovin'. Read up on his powers...fairly simple fight. And for good laughs: watch the embedded "tutorial" (they wipe XD )

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...28331&sid=1 Fair warning to our old-school Crushers (*COUGH*): you will crit thy pants upon reading this. Holy feck that's cool. I foresee much QQ about L80 whelps eating people.

Guess what? More bugs. This one goes out to folks who are still running Naxx. Found it on MMO-Champ. The encounter is still beat-able if you're careful: TLDR: Unless this is fixed via the restarts, expect undead friends/weird gate behavior during Gothik.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...81949&sid=1 It'll be hard to say until after the restarts, but last night XT was NOT fixed. Rape-by-robots FTL. The dungeon has also experienced even more stealth nerfs/bugs besides XT and Flame Leviathan. See this blog for a list of changes collected from the official WoW forums: Check out more XT lulz I found on Maintankadin.com: [Archimonde voice] ...IT BURNS!

FYI - I will be out of town all day Sunday (8/9/09), so can't make it to Ulduar-10 or Teph's Alt Naxx run

Great job last night on surviving XT and his army of possessed toys. And yes, this also affects 10-man Ulduar. Blizz is supposeably working on it. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...=2&sid=1#21 Flame Leviathan is also borked: we left two towers up, yet he was buffed as if Freya's was still active. Grr. If you want a laugh, here's another guild's movie of said XT-002 "bug": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hptpAYt7mSM. Skip to about 1:50 min in for the fun part.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...91048&sid=1 This doesn't come as much of a surprise if you heard of the new Faction Change service coming. No character limitations = more moneys in Blizzard's pockets, and it should make people who are brave enough to play on PvP realms a lot happier.

OH FECK, I JUST DROPPED A CONTACT!

Ignore what I said about no Extended Maintenance. Don't you just love inevitability? http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...55659&sid=1

I'm more worried about the lack of Extended Maintenance for this patch. I predict server vomits galore, not to mention a sea of QQs from people that cannot get into the Colosseum 5-man due to full instances (since everyone's going to chain-farm Heroics for the new badges). So what's on everyone's to-do list? I'm gonna... - Download new addons as I stare at the Authenticating/load screen. - Prospect the dump-truck load of Titanium Ore I farmed...and blow all the JC tokens on tanky designs >.> - Pay some raptors a visit in an attempt to boost my lackluster pet collection. The new raptor minipet art brings back fond memories of the Bonk games on TG16... Here's a list for our pet-crazed Crushers to get a jump-start! Darting Hatchling - Dart - Dustwallow Marsh Leaping Hatchling - Takk the Leaper - The Barrens Obsidian Hatchling - Vendor - Breanni - Dalaran Razormaw Hatchling - Razormaw Matriarch - Wetlands Razzashi Hatchling - Razzashi Raptor - Zul'Gurub - Buy the Paladin-only Tourney charger. Hi-ho silver~! - Muster the courage to run Occulus now that drakes scale with gear. - Take a funny picture with "black" Orcala. - /popcorn as people in public channels QQ over not reading the notes. - Brainstorm my first actual twink. Yay for freezing XP gains!

http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/...patchnotes.html Rawr! See above for 3.2 mirrors. Also: be wary of where you go to update your addons. Sites have been affected by a new Adobe Flash trojan, and while places like Curse.com have claimed to fix the problem, that doesn't mean it's completely gone from other websites. http://www.curse.com/articles/curse-en-news/526956.aspx Happy patching! *opens a fridge full of Night Elf heads to feed to his baby Venomhide Ravasaur*