Part III isn’t as over the top as the first two, and is also a bit shorter. The fighting remains amazing, and part of the fight reminds me of the fight between Black Star and Mifune from a Soul Eater episode.

Here is some Tifa on Hitomi action:

And again, if you missed parts 1 and 2, you can watch them HERE. Enjoy!

What I’ve found, is how Mana efficient (yea you heard right) Living Bomb can be when there are multiple targets with Ignite ticking on them. Since Empowered Fire will also return ~65 Mana every time Ignite ticks with this upcoming patch, I never ran out of Mana while messing around on the Practice Dummies.

This doesn’t mean you can go Living Bomb crazy on trash. You don’t get Mana back if Ignite isn’t ticking. Ignite can’t tick if your targets are dead. Sure you will still do a ton of damage during trash mobs, but where it would really shine is on targets with a lot of Hit Points- Kologarn and his arms for example.

Here is a video of Living Bomb in action. It’s a shame I forgot to enable Mana gains on my User Interface to show how much Mana I was getting back.

Imagine 5 Fire Mages doing this in Arena! Dispel? Boom! Let it tick? Boom! Hate to be the healer who will have to keep their teammates alive through that.

The home console version that is. Kotaku has found an image of a Japanese article which confirmed that the Japanese school girl will join the Street Fighter IV rosters.

The Street Fighter 4 Arcade has been out for quite some time now in Japan, and in a few selected locations in the United States, and I have been eagerly waiting to get my hands on the game. I’ve been hoping for a few characters would make the roster, and it looks like my top choice has made it to the game.

“Sakura first appeared in Street Fighter Alpha 2, where she had begun to participate in street fighting after watching Ryu win the first World Warrior tournament. She was searching for him and wished for him to train her to be a better fighter.

She met up with many interesting people along the way, and eventually came across Ryu, who was still stressed over the Satsui no Hadou that had corrupted him—he told her he could not train her as he still had much to learn himself. He sparred with her for a bit and as he began to leave, she took a picture of him to remember him by.”

[wikipedia]

Here is a look at the trailer for Sakura which was played during the Tokyo Game Show (TGS), which took place October 5th through the 15th.

Also shown at TGS, was the trailer for Gouki, better known as Akuma in the United States. Here is a look at his trailer.

Though the arcade version of SFIV has been out since July, the console version’s release date has not been announced yet. So until then, we must settle for videos and screenshots. Unless you’re lucky enough to live near one of the few arcade locations.

Let’s see who else I would like next to join the Street Fighter 4 roster… Cammy!

As you may know by now, in the WotLK Beta, Blizzard ticks can now critically strike. Untalented, it will critically hit at the rate of your Frost Crit %. Blizzard is affected by many talents which will increase the crit rate even further.

Download to better video version HERE. (4.6mb)

9/13/2008

Blizzard with Fingers of Frost Proc’d

After testing the critical strike percentage using Recount, when I cast Blizzard while having the Fingers of Frost buff, I got around 45-55% critical strike % on the Blizzard ticks. My passive spell crit % with gear is 26%. Download to better video version HERE. (6.5mb)

3/3 Improved Blizzard with 3/3 Frostbite and 2/2 Fingers of Frost (not proc’d)

As you can see here, with Improved Blizzard and Frostbite, it substantially increases the critical strike % of the Blizzard ticks. The reason for this? For some reason, possibly unintended, the Frostbite procs seemed to have also proc’d or refreshed Fingers of Frost. The pushed my critical strike % up to 75-80%. Without Frostbite and Improved Blizzard, I haven’t had any success getting Blizzard ticks to proc Fingers of Frost. Download to better video version HERE. (27.2mb)

I also played around with the new Impact, which has a chance to proc off of ANY spells, and Blizzard is one of them. Right now, Blizzard seems very powerful on the Beta. Maybe a little too powerful. A fully talented Blizzard with all the bells and whistles, you have one heck of a spell.

Your Blizzard will slow down your targets by 85%, with a 15% chance to Freeze, 10% chance to Stun on each tick. All that on top of the 50+ Crit % of the Blizzard ticks. I tested it out on a group of mobs, and they never left the first Blizzard circle.

My role in this fight has been changed from what I am typically used to in a boss fight. I’ve been selected to be the Dragon Orb Controller during the encounter. At first I was excited because I get to do something different, and something unique. Then it took me a few attempts to realize that the fate of the raid now depends on me. Eeek!

If you are familiar with the first boss in the Blackwing Lair, Razorgore, the Dragon Orbs are similar. You click on the Dragon Orb, and take control of a Dragon NPC, and use its various abilities to “beat the boss”. The reason why I was selected to be the Orb Controller? I am a Mage.

The room where we fight Kil’jaeden is a big circular room, and the four Dragon Orbs are spread out equally along the edge forming a sort of square inside the circle. During the fight a random orb will have a ring of fire around it, signifying that you must use that particular one. Being a Mage, we have the ability to go from Point A to Point B in a fairly short time.

The orb duty used to be split with me and another Warrior (he would use intercept on a player close to his orb), but then we got to a point where we have the execution down, but now need the DPS. So instead of having two players not DPSing full time, we can just use one.

Here is a video of what I do during the Kil’jaeden fight:

Phase 1: Three Mobs

• Kill the Summoners
• Stay at Max Ranged to avoid Shadowbolt Volley
• Stay away from Imps

Phase 2: Kil’jaeden the Deceiver

• DPS Kil’jaeden
• Kill Shield Orbs as soon as they appear.
• Ice Block out of Fire Bloom

Phase 3: Attack of the Clones

• Continue dealing with Shield Orbs
• Deal with Clones depending on class
• Orb Duty

Phase 4: Armageddon

• Didn’t make it this far in the video

Dragon Orb: Burninate the Countryside

• Haste and Revitalize Breath on Melee Group 1
• Haste and Revitalize Breath on Melee Group 2
• Position in the middle of raid for Shield
• Repeat

Link to Youtube Video HERE. Link to download the Video from RapidShare HERE (98mb).

I use the Breaths on the Melee groups because they will be doing the most damage on Kil’jaeden. Ranged DPS will be concentrating on Shield Orbs first, Kil’jaeden second. Shield must be used right before Kil’jaeden’s super move, or the raid will die. The fate of the raid rested in the hands of a Mage… Yay!

It took me a couple of attempts before I could get comfortable with using the Dragon, and get used to the abilities, and the cooldowns for each ability. Our best attempt so far is 54%, which is the start of Phase 4, but pretty much the entire raid was dead at that point, but it’s progression!

Some of the new changes are just rewording of the text of the talents for Improved Water Elemental and Winter’s Chill. Then there are talents which its mechanics have been changed. They are Focus Magic, Molten Fury, and Hot Streak. And of course, the addition of the new level 80 Mage Spell, Mirror Image. I’m sure there are other changes that I have missed, these are just the ones which caught my eye at first glance.

The Focus Magic has been changed to increase the Spell Power of the entire party or raid by 150, and lasts for 1 min or 50 charges. Not only will other spell casters which will want you to have this talent, but other healers as well.

The new Molten Fury has reduced the damage bonus, but increased the duration by changing it so that it is active when the target is at 35% Health, instead of 20% Health. Overall, you should be seeing a damage increase.

The new Hot Streak has been changed to give you an instant cast Pyroblast whenever you get two crits in a row with Fireball, Scorch, or Frostfire Bolt. Increase in DPS for PvE, and gives Fire Mages more potential to melt some faces in PvP.

The new text for Winter’s Chill now states that it increase the critical strike chance for ALL Spells. This is also true for Improved Scorch, and now that talent does the same thing as Winter’s Chill (Boo! I liked the old imp scorch better!). Yes Shadow Priest and Elemental Shamans, you may now join the cool kids club.

A range requirement as been added in order for the party or raid members to receive the Water Elemental’s aura. The range is 100 yards.

And last but not least, Mirror Image has been confirmed to be the new level 80 Mage Spell. For the cost of 10% of your base mana, you can now create 3 clones of yourself. Now here is a look at the spell in action!

Also note, the mage in the video is Fire Spec (you can see hot streak in action too) and the images are pretty much just casting Frostbolts instead of what the Mage is casting. From what I see in the video, the Mirror Images are like the Boomkin’s Treants and just attack your target randomly. I would liked it if they moved around a bit more, or if each image could cast a different spell each or something. It’s still in beta phase, so maybe we’ll see some changes.

Kil’jaeden

The encounter is definitely a fun fight. The M’uru/Entropius fight was really a good test and great preparation for the final battle with the Deceiver. The fight is a combination of a lot of boss encounters. It is like Magtheridon, Curator, Void Reaver, Razorgore the Untamed, Teron Gorefiend, and Hex Lord Malacrass, all put together into one fight.

The fight is also a lore extensive fight, much like the Illidan fight with Akama and Maiev Shadowsong. I suggest reading up on Anveena and Kalecgos to learn more about the whole Sunwell Plateau instance.

Spoiler Alert! The rest of the post will go through the phases of the fight, which will include some spoilers to the Sunwell story. I have also included a video of the first 3 Phases of the fight, so if you do not wish to know how the fight goes, or know how the fight ends, you might not want to continue.

The Deceiver

Phase One: The fight begins like the beginning of the Magtheridon fight where you take out summoners before the main boss is released. After the three Hands of the Deceivers are dead, Kil’jaeden is summoned out of the Sunwell.

Phase Two: Kil’jaeden is summoned, but he is only halfway out of the Sunwell when you fight him. During the fight, he spawns Shield Orbs which does damage similar to the one in the Teron Gorfiend, but moves around and can be killed like the orbs which Curator spawns. He spawns one orb every minute or so.

He also does random fire damage to the raid. Fire Bloom is casted on random raid members, which does periodic fire damage to the person, as well as anyone standing within 10 yards of the affected player. The next phase begins when you get Kil’jaeden down to 85%.

Phase Three: Right when he switches to this phase, he will randomly target a raid member, and creates four clones of that person. Much like the Hex Lord fight, the abilities of the clone differs depending on the class. The clones need to be picked up by a tank, and AoE’d down.

During this phase, Kil’jaeden will target random players and send a Shadow Spike at that person. Just like the Void Reaver fight, it has a travel time, and does AoE damage on impact, but instead of silencing the person when hit, it reduces incoming healing on the player. Oh and remember the Shield Orbs from the previous phase? He spawns two of them every minute or so now.

He also has another fire spell to do more random damage. Flame Darts hits the entire raid, and also reduces the player’s movement speed by 50%. This can be countered by the Blue Dragon’s haste buff.

That is not all. Every minute, Kil’jaeden does an ability called Darkness of a Thousand Souls which has an 8 second cast time, and does 50,000 Shadow Damage to the entire raid. How do you survive this? With the Blue Dragon’s shield ability.

During this phase, Kalecgos offers his helps and empowers one of the four Dragon Orbs located around the room. When he empowers one of them, one of the assigned raid members will click on the orb and take control a dragon, much like the Razorgore fight. The Blue Dragon has four abilities, a Blink, two cone breaths, and a shield. Perfect for a Mage to control.

Blink is exactly like a Mage’s Blink. The first breath gives a Haste buff to any raid members within the cone. The second breath restores health and mana to any raid members within the cone. The shield ability creates a big shield in which everyone in the raid can take cover under, and survive Kil’jaeden’s Darkness of a Thousand Souls. The next phase begins when Kil’jaeden is taken down to 55%.

Phase Four: The phase begins again with four more clones of an randomly targeted player. He also spawns three Shield Orbs instead of two. Another new ability is used. Armageddon is a spell he uses which drops a meteor which does 10,000 fire damage. Everyone must move out of the way before it hits. There will be 3 of them dropping at any given time.

Other than that, it is the same as the previous phase with the Shadow Spikes and Dragon Orbs . The next phase begins when Kil’jaeden is at 25%.

Phase Five: He begins the phase the same as the previous two phases with the clones again. This time, there will be no more Shield Orb spawns, and he now does Darkness of a Thousand Souls every 30 seconds or so. There will now be 5 Armageddon drops at any given time.

During this phase, Anveena sacrifices herself to help defeat Kil’jaeden. When she does her sacrifice, it causes Kil’jaeden to take 25% increased Holy Damage. Also at the time of the sacrifice, Kil’jaeden is stunned for 5 seconds, and all four Dragon Orbs are empowered.

This is the final phase, and there is a touching scene if you can get him down to 0%. You should also note that when you defeat Kil’jaeden, you don’t kill him, but prevent him from being fully summoned, and he goes back to where he was.

Here is a video of one of our attempts at Kil’jaeden. You can see phases 1-3 in this video.

The reason why you see me panning the camera up a lot is because I was looking for Shield Orbs (I didn’t have a /target macro set yet), and the reason why I was panning left and right was because I was on Dragon Orb duty, and was keeping an eye on the two orbs I was assigned to.

As always, you can download a better version of the video HERE from Rapidshare. The file size is about 85mb.

[Images and General Strategy used was taken from wowwiki.com]

A few people have seen me use Evocation during Battlegrounds after I am oom, or even in Ironforge after conjuring up some food for someone. They would ask:

“Why do you switch weapons for Evocation? They changed it from Spirit base to a % of your total mana!”.

I link them my Evoc weapons and most of the time I get a response of, “Oooh… I see, thanks!” other times it is a, “WTF you n00b! Why would you enchant it with Intellect!?”. Sometimes I explain, sometimes I don’t even bother. Depends on the mood I’m in I guess, or if they leave out the “WTF you n00b!” part. Well here it goes…

Before Patch 2.3, Evocation used to return mana based on how much Spirit you had. This gave a few Mages the idea of carrying around a Spirit Staff and Wand to switch to during Evocation. In Patch 2.3, Blizzard changed it so that Evocation now gave you a percentage of your total Mana. No more need to carry Spirit weapons. Now you need to carry Intellect weapons!

Why Intellect? Now that it is based off your total mana, by increasing your total mana before you use Evocation, the more mana you will receive.

Lets take a look at Evocation. While channeling this spell, you gain 60% of your total mana over 8 sec. Gain 15% of total mana every 2 sec.

That means if you are at 9,000 total mana, when you Evoc, you will gain 5,400 mana back. If you are at 10,000 total mana, you will gain 6,000 mana back.

What gives you more mana? Intellect of course. Each point of Intellect will give you 15 mana. So increasing your Intellect +50 by swapping out weapons, will give you 750 more mana.

My Intellect weapons: [Amani Divining Staff] with 3 x 8 Intellect Gems and +30 Intellect enchant, and [Vengeful Gladiator's Touch of Defeat]. They gave me +62 Intellect (930 mana) over my DPS weapons. You can use any weapon which has more Intellect than your DPS weapons.

We’ll use Utada in our example:

With the gear she is wearing, she is at 489 Intellect with a mana pool of 9,296. When she Evocs, she will gain ~1,389.3 mana a tick, for a total of 5,557.2 mana return.

If she swaps out to her Intellect weapons before using Evoc, she will have 10,226 total mana. She will gain 1,533.9 mana a tick, for a total of 6,135.6 mana return.

An increase of 578.4 mana, and that is only in Tier 2 gear! You will get even more with raid buffs, and Tier 6 bonus.

What if we did that with our current raiding gear with 2 Piece Tier 6 bonus? We would get an extra mana tick, giving us 75% of our total mana back.

Without swapping, she is at 581 Intellect, and 10,676 total mana. Evoc would yield 8,007 mana at 1,601.4 a tick. With Intellect swapping, she would be at 643 Intellect with 11,606 total mana. Evoc will give 1,740.9 a tick, returning  8,704.5 mana back. A 697.5 mana increase! Again, without raid buffs.

Evocation Macro:

#showtooltip Evocation
/castsequence [button:1] reset=10 Amani Divining Staff, Vengeful Gladiator’s Touch of Defeat, Evocation;
/stopmacro [button:1]
/equip Tempest of Chaos
/equip Heart of the Pit
/equip Wand of the Demonsoul

Left click once to swap in the staff, left click again to swap in the wand, left click the third time to use Evocation. Right click after Evoc to re-equip your DPS weapons. Modify the macro to suit the gear that you currently have.

NOTE: When in combat, swapping weapons will put a 1.5 second Global Cooldown on all your spells. So there will be a delay after swapping in your wand before you can use Evocation. With that macro, you can just left click spam the button until you start using Evoc.

As you can see, carrying around an extra set of weapons will give you a big boost in mana return for Evocation, and is totally worth two extra inventory space. A mage with no mana is pretty much worthless in both PvE and PvP.

Again I apologize for the crappy video quality. You can download all 3 videos zipped together HERE. The quality is a little bit better and you can actually read some of the number values, but still pretty crappy.

“You must defeat Shen Long to stand a chance!” will actually have some meaning behind this now.

Hmm… only 8 workers. WotLK won’t be here for a long long time!

This might be the reason for some of the glitches in the graphics you may be seeing during the Midsummer Festival while you are running around in the area. Who knows?

In the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, there will be a new addition to Stormwind, which will provide transportation for players to travel to Northrend. It will also provide players in Darnasus a boat ride directly to the Stormwind Harbor. No more taking the boat to Wetlands and corpse running your way to Ironforge for newbie NE players!

Here is a video I found of someone taking a tour through the Stormwind Harbor on the WotLK Alpha Test:

The new Stormwind Harbor looks really big. It looked like it could be 2/3 the size of Stormwind City itself! I see myself jumping down and slowfalling towards those boats a lot in the future. Time to stock up on Light Feathers!

I wonder if they will be making any changes to any other capitals or how Horde will get to the Northrend. Maybe one of their cities are getting a harbor too? Or maybe a Zepplin airbase!