Working on a new layout for Spicytuna right now. So far it is looking good, and I am liking the way everything is going.

If you would like to do a test run on it, you can go to www.spicytunas.com/test and let me know how you think about it. Or if you run into any errors or bugs that I should know about.

Woops! I forgot to give credit to MMO-Champion for this quick up to date news. They also provided us with an updated Talent Calculator to reflect the changes in the WotLK Beta Build 8820: Talent Calculator

Glyphs:

• Glyph of Fireball - Increases the initial damage dealt by Fireball by 5%, but removes the damage over time effect.
• Glyph of Fireblast - Increases the critical strike chance of Fireblast by 50% when the target is stunned or incapacitated.
• Glyph of Frost Nova - Your Frost Nova targets can take an additional 20% damage before the Frost Nova effect automatically breaks.
• Glyph of Frostbolt - Increases the damage dealt by Frostbolt by 5%, but removes the slowing effect.
• Glyph of Ice Armor - Your Ice Armor and Frost Armor spells grant an additional 20% armor and resistance.
• Glyph of Ice Block - Your Frost Nova cooldown is now reset every time you use Ice Block.
• Glyph of Ice Lance - Increases the range of your Ice Lance by 5 yards.
• Glyph of Icy Veins - Your Icy Veins ability also removes all movement slowing and cast time slowing effects.
• Glyph of Improved Scorch - The Improved Scorch talent now generates 5 applications of the Improved Scorch effect each time Scorch is cast.
• Glyph of Invisibility - Increases the duration of the Invisibility effect by 5 sec.
• Glyph of Mage Armor - Your Mage Armor spell grants an additional 20% mana regeneration while casting.
• Glyph of Mana Gem - Increases the mana recieved from using a mana gem by 10%.
• Glyph of Molten Armor - Your Molten Armor spell grants an additional 2% critical strike chance.
• Glyph of Polymorph - Your Polymorph spell also removes all damage over time effects from the target.
• Glyph of Remove Curse - Your Remove Curse spell also makes the target immune to all Curses for 6 sec.
• Glyph of Water Elemental - Reduces the cooldown of your Summon Water Elemental spell by 30 sec.
• Glyph of the Penguin - Empowers a Minor Glyph to cause your Polymorph: Sheep spell to turn the target into a baby penguin.

Thoughts:

Now we get a chance to look at what Inscriptions will give to Mages in WotLK, and they all look pretty good at first glance. There are some which give a boost in PvE and some good for PvP and some are just good all around.

For PvE, a plus +5% bonus to Frostbolt and Fireball at the cost of losing the slowing effect and dot. For Frost Mages this is a big plus in raiding where bosses aren’t slowable by Frost Spells anyways. An extra 20% Mana regen from Mage Armor to help out the Arcane Mages, and an extra 2% Spell Crit on Molten Armor for Frost and Fire Mages. Cooldown reduction on Water Elemental by 30%, and Improved Scorch stacking 5 at once are both good too. Polymorph removing dots! No more broken sheeps in raids due to mis-dotting Priests and Warlocks.

For PvP, an extra 5 yard range on Ice Lance gives it a 41 yard range with talents. Ice Armor gives an extra 20% armor. Icy Veins removes slowing effects on you will also help a lot in PvP.

Then there are Glyphs that are just good all around. Extra mana return on Mana Gems, immunity to curses after a decurse, and of course Polymorph: Penguin, can’t forget that one!

Finally, I was able to get back to Arena. For the past 3 weeks, either me or my partner were unable to be on at the same time to get our 10+ games in for points. So after weeks of packing, moving, going on trips, power outages, internet difficulties, and sickness, we are back! But we were rusty.

After not doing Arena for 3 straight weeks and coming back, it felt like a whole new game. We weren’t in sync, and we go into a fight not thinking on the same page. We would lose to class combos which we normally have no problems dealing with. I was making a lot of careless mistakes. I was letting Warriors get Charges off, Blinking at the wrong times, missing my Counterspells, etc.

Warlocks are OP

Warlocks! This week, they have renewed my hatred towards their class. Fear lasts an eternity in fights, and it seems to NEVER break on damage and their Fel Puppy can pretty much solo me. They have a billion hit points, and their healer partners don’t even need to jump in to help. Okay, a little exaggeration, but yea, boo locks!

Okay, so we started off slow, then we had a mirror match which put us back into the game. Mage/Warlock vs Mage/Warlock. The match started and we went after the Warlock while I tried to Sheep the Mage. Our opponents thought the same. So me and the Mage play fake out with our casting, while our Warlock partners are killing each other. Then both locks died. Cool, one on one with a Mage, I can handle it.

Then all of a sudden, something hits me. Something I haven’t felt since my freshmen year of college during my Freshmen Engineering Design Project presentation on Implementing Solar Panels on Cellphones. My heart rate jumps up, then my arms and hands starts getting numb. They were getting the pins and needles feeling as if blood circulation was being cut off. “WTF!?”, I thought to myself, “Stupid hands! Now isn’t a good time to be not functioning!”.

With my hands operating at 50% capacity, the fight went on. The Mage made a mistake of popping his Water Elemental while I was far away, and I manage to escape behind a pillar and get an Invisibility off. I ran my Invisible behind to a random pillar and began eating hoping he wasn’t near when I popped out. Good, he wasn’t near, and he was still running around looking for me. His pet disappeared, and I show up with full health, full mana, and all my cooldowns. I eventually won the fight, but as the match went on, my hands were getting worst and worst.

After the match, I called a timeout to my partner (to hold up on the next queue) to take a short break. I looked at my hand, which are now shaking. You know in some movies where the hero takes a life for the first time, and stares at his hands which are covered in blood? Yea it kinda looked like that, you know, without the blood. So I went to used the bathroom, then went downstairs to grab a drink.

After I calmed down a bit, we resumed Arena, and it never happened again. Weird… normally I can remain poised under pressure, I had no idea where that panic attack came from. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to lose to a team that was the same as us. Or maybe it was because I didn’t want to lose to a fellow Frost Mage.

Anyways, we ended up hitting 1652 rating for the week, going 12-8. We stopped because we wanted to get our Season 4 rings (which requires a 1650+ rating). Things didn’t go as smoothly though. We then had a conversation which went something like this:

Me: Yay 1652! We can get our S4 Rings now!
Lock: Yay! Then after that we can get to 1700 and get our S4 Helms!
Me: Yea good idea, lets grab our Rings first incase we drop in rating.
Lock: Okay!

- one minute later -

Me: Uhh… How much honor did you have saved up?

Lock: Dammit! I just remembered I just spent it on xxxx piece yesterday!
Me: >_< I only have 1935 honor right now!
Lock: I have 235! LoL!
Me: Maybe we should queue into Battlegrounds and farm some honor?
Lock: Alrighties, which BG you wanna do?

- one minute later -

Me: On second thought, I think I’m just gonna take a nap or something…
Lock: Haha yea me too. We can do BGs tomorrow or wait for a preform or something.

Moral of the story, have your honor points saved ahead of time. And take your vitamins* or something to prevent panic attacks.

Ahh Battlegrounds… I have such love/hate relationship with it (I can probably do a whole separate post on this). I really do enjoy PvPing, it’s just sometimes I have to deal with afkers, or players running off doing their own thing. This usually results in a loss, which I don’t like. I have a pretty competitive nature, and I don’t like to lose. According to Euripedes, I am an “Enthusiast” turned “Pro”.

So I do like 3 games of Battlegrounds now then get bored and stop. I now have about 7800 honor saved up for the ring. I need like 8000 more honor to go. Hopefully I can get that sometime before my next Arena matches.

*vitamins most likely had nothing to do with it.

World of Warcraft:

Big news for me, and I think it is worth mentioning again, M’uru / Entropius finally down! Working on Kil’jaeden now, and hopefully soon, I can say, “I beat the game!” again…

Video Games:

Final Fantasy IV: I reached the final dungeon and it has been kicking my butt. Looks like I reached it too fast and need to take some time and grind out some levels for my party. However, the thought of grinding out levels then prompted me to get a new game.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Yep another RPG, I just love them. I played Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced to death (99hr59min59sec) last year, and I can pretty much guarantee you that I will do the same on A2 also. The game starts off pretty much exactly the same way. Boy gets sucked into a book and appears in a fantasy world and tries to find his way home.

Movies:

I saw Tropic Thunder over the weekend. Freakin’ hilarious! That is if you enjoy that kind of humor. I guess it would be “crude humor”? If thought movies like Superbad, Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin, or Wedding Crashers funny, then you would enjoy this movie.

I also saw Step Brothers while I was home (I watch a crap load of movies everytime I go to my parent’s house). Funniest Will Ferrell movie to date.

Anime:

After coming back from Otakon, there were a few anime series that I saw there that made me want to watch. They were recommendations by fellow otakus I met during the con. They are:

• D.Gray-Man
• Full Moon o Sagashite
• Jigoku Shoujo
• RahXephon

Anything else you would recommend? I think I may go through an anime watching spree sometime in the near future.

Real Life:

I know I promised pictures, but I ran into some technical difficulties with the computer at the NJ Home. That and I still have to get pictures from the other people I went with. Here is another one though:

Kingdom Hearts Cosplayers

Computer problems are a huge pain to work with. The problem I ran in with my sister’s computer back home rendered the computer inoperable, and I was forced to reformat it.

Cambios from Muckbeast made a few comments about end game satisfaction, and raiding in general. He does make some very good points, both here and in his blog. I know where he’s coming at and agree with some of his points to a certain degree.

Maybe because of his game design background, he is viewing this from a different angle from how I view things (have you ever watched a movie with a film major? not too fun). So I would like to give my view on how I see things, and have some counter points to some of his arguments.

“Think about that, and then ask yourself if it was really worth all the broken friendships, drama, anger, rage, arguments, etc. that it took to get to this point.”

I myself have not gone through any of this getting to this point. Maybe frustration on some bosses, but it never anything extreme. I know it has happened to quite a bit of players, but not all. You can’t just assume that all end game raiders go through all of this just to be successful with it. I am lucky enough to not have to go through all that.

There are a lot of people who put up with all of that, and still think it is worth all that trouble. I wouldn’t go through broken friendships myself, but drama, anger, rage, and arguments I can put up with to see all this end game content. Then there are players who don’t think it is worth it, and won’t pursue the end game content grind.

As a married person, do you think it was really worth all the broken friendships, drama, anger, rage, arguments, etc. that it took to get to that point (marriage)? I know this isn’t the best comparison, but it still shows that different people find things that are or are not worth fighting for. Some people will think such a relationship is not worth all the trouble, some who believe it is worth all the ups and downs, and there are those who are lucky enough to be able to make it through without running into any sorts of troubles.

“An hour of killing trash for the ?greward?h of a 10 minute, scripted boss battle is like suffering through a root canal for the reward of a prostate exam. Oh, and if something goes wrong in that boss battle, you very well might be clearing that same hour of trash to take another shot at it.”

The ONLY “end game” boss encounters which make you clear “hours of trash” after a boss wipe is in Mount Hyjal, where you have to clear eight waves of trash before each boss fight (which takes about 10 minutes by the way), so I’m not sure which bosses you are referring to. All other instances allow about an hour and half of boss attempts before the trash respawns.

If clearing trash is such a horrible experience to go through, then why are there so many people going on “trash runs” or deliberately wiping on Mount Hyjal bosses for the soul reason to redo the trash waves? That is because trash mobs drop very good loot, and provide a lot of rep for many players. Many guilds don’t kill specific bosses in the Black Temple so that they could return later and kill all the trash mobs over again.

In fact, there is so little trash in Sunwell, that many people wish there were more trash to clear. There is only two pulls between Kalecgos and Brutallus. None between Brutallus and Felmyst. Only two total mobs between M’uru and Kil’jaeden.

“People that get massively sucked into raiding fulfill this need through raid success. As a result, they often have less of a drive to work on their family, friends, children, spouse, job, or school. So the actually important things in their real life suffer because this crucial need is being satisfied through MMO raiding.”

Yes there have been many stories of people who have been too absorbed into the game that it has affect other aspects of their lives. This isn’t just raiding, the entire game is addicting. Ultimately, it is the player who has to do something about this. It’s not Blizzard’s fault they designed a good game.

The player has to be the one to manage their own time and set their own priorities. Monique of Girls Don’t Game has written a very good article on this from her very own personal experience.

I personally raid 3 nights a week in a guild that has progressed steadily through Sunwell and is currently on the last boss of The Burning Crusade. There are many guilds out there who raid 4 to 5 days a week, even 7 days a week. That would be way to much for me. I know where my own limit is, and everyone should figure out their own limit.

“I play games to PLAY THE ACTUAL GAME. I don?ft play games to load up a web site and read a step by step strategy for how to defeat a boss. Sure, you don?ft have to use raid walkthroughs, but you have to be masochistic not to. Raid encounters are generally designed to require an extremely specific set of maneuvers in order to defeat them.”

These boss guides are there to help you and provide tips for you to take down specific bosses. They give you a heads up on what abilities the boss does, and offer suggestions on how to deal with them. Things you will learn after one or two attempts on a boss anyways, so it just to save you some time and attempts. Sure you don’t have to read boss strategy, but it helps.

Knowing how to beat a boss doesn’t mean the boss will automatically be beaten. If it were so, then every guild would have Kil’jaeden down by now. It still requires a lot of attempts and practice in order to kill the boss. Just because you read up and watched videos on how to ride a bike, or how to swim, doesn’t mean you can start cycling and swimming like you were Lance Armstrong or Micheal Phelps.

“I also hate the way raiding turns people into such a tiny fraction of what their character can and should be. Most characters end up using 2 or 3 abilities 90% of the time, and in the same exact order over and over again. That gets incredibly boring.”

This doesn’t just apply to raiding, this applies to all aspects of the game. If you are leveling, raiding, doing 5 man instances, or even PvPing, you will spam the same few abilities over and over again depending on class and spec. So if you find that incredibly boring, then you are playing the wrong game.

In fact, I use more of my Mage’s ability in raids than in any other aspect of the game. There are spells I use in raids that I have never used while farming, leveling, or PvPing. That is just the Mage class though. If you are looking at Healing classes, of course they can’t heal a mob to death while farming, but in PvP, they do the same thing they do in raids, keep other people alive.

“It was something like all of our mages and warlocks had the tier 4 (something), so we had to make sure if we did a certain boss we had a hunter along. Otherwise if that token dropped it would be wasted. Having your roster decisions affected in this way is just stupid design.”

If your raid roster decisions are being affected this way, maybe this is the reason why you aren’t having much success in raids. If you aren’t killing a boss because you don’t have the right roster, and you don’t have the right roster because you changed it based on loot, then this isn’t because of stupid design, it is because poor raid decisions.

I know a lot of guilds do this to get more people geared (even my guild does it), but only if it doesn’t affect the raid. That and we only switch out players for the same class. We’re not gonna potentially wipe on a boss for hours just because one piece of loot could potentially be destroyed.

“The reality is that each member of that 5 man group probably worked a lot harder, put in more effort, and used a lot more skill than a single member of that 25 man raid group. In that 4 hour raid, at least 20 of those 25 people probably only paid full attention for maybe 30-60 minutes of that entire 4 hours. In the 5 man group, all 5 had to pay attention for pretty much the whole time.”

I don’t believe this is true. I think it takes more skill and coordination in a raid than in a group. In 25 man raids, the mobs and bosses hit harder and more often. The players have to heal more often, and do more damage in raids than in 5 man groups. It is different for everyone, but for me, I’ve seen more “/afk” players in 5 man groups than in 25 man raids.

I don’t know how much experience you have in raiding (I know you have at least done Karazhan), but if you allowing 5 players in the raid to slack off for 3 hours in a 4 hour raid, then the fault is on the raid leader/officers. With many tools out there such as Recount or WWS, you can easily find out who isn’t doing their part in the raid, and can be easily be replaced by someone who can.

“Then one of our guild members switched his priest to a shadow priest, ran a few 5 mans to gear up, and we rolled over the Curator with ease. Adding this ONE class (aka mana battery) completely transformed everything. We had read that a shadow priest was virtually required to win, but had foolishly tried to do it without one (since we didn?ft have one). The utter inflexibility of the boss encounter made it so you pretty much had to forget about success if you didn?ft bring this one specific class. Lame.”

I agree that some bosses require certain types of classes in order to beat it, and it may seem unfair at times. Every raid encounter requires an X amount of Tanks, Y amount of Healers, and Z amount of DPS. They require a the right balance of classes, but rarely ever need a specific type of class. Some classes may have an advantage over other classes though. For example, bringing a Mage over a Druid for a decursing fight. Stopping DPS to decurse might not wipe a raid, but stopping heals to decurse might.

Your example isn’t a good one. The reason why you killed Curator easily with a Shadow Priest, isn’t because you brought a Shadow Priest. You replaced a healer with a DPS class, and that is the real reason why you were successful. Curator does NOT require a Shadow Priest at all. You could have brought in a Rogue instead, and have the same result.

“WoW raiding however has taken a horrible turn. It is the *only* form of end game content, it requires tons of preparatory farming, it requires *TONS* of trash killing, and the raid encounters themselves have far too much randomness/arbitrariness, too many random power immunities, etc.”

It depends on player’s definition of “end game content”. To some players, it may very well be raiding, and to others, it may be the Season 4 Gladiator title and flying mount. Many people play the game who likes raiding, many who likes to PvP. There are some who are completely content with just 5 man instances or just running Karazhan. Everyone is different.

First you bash raid encounter designs for having players go through specific actions in specific times, and how it takes no skills and players don’t have to react to anything. Then you say there are too many randomness in encounters. Which is it? The fact is that players in a raid do have to think fast, and make many split second decisions during raids.

Whatever it may be, of course it will require some sort of preparation. You wouldn’t go into a meeting or an exam totally unprepared would you? No, you would plan ahead, practice your speech for the meeting, or study your ass off for the exam.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I enjoy raiding, and have a lot of fun doing it, and I do get a sense of “achievement” when beating a boss. If you don’t, why are you even raiding? Whenever you see a video where a raid successfully down a difficult boss, you always here the “nerdgasms” at the end from everyone over vent. Yes there are many people who get a sense of satisfaction when defeating a boss, and that is good indication of good game design by Blizzard. As a game designer yourself, you would think this to be an important element in a good game wouldn’t you?

From what I’ve read from your comments, and articles, you have only Karazhan raiding experience (no 25 man raids), and are basing your arguments from only that. You can’t start bashing end game raiding if you haven’t experienced it yourself. Your views on end game raiding would be different if you were in a successful raiding guild.

Maybe you have had very bad experiences with raids, or maybe raiding just isn’t right for you. Everyone has their own likes and dislikes, and you are entitled to think anyway you want. You obviously have more MMO experiences than me, so you have other games to compare WoW’s raiding system with. My only other MMO experience is FFXI, which I really enjoyed, but thought it required way too much time in order to do anything (which is why I stopped).

Another blog milestone reached!

That is all. Enjoy your weekend!

Kil’jaeden the Deceiver, is the sixth and final boss of the Sunwell Plateau, and as well as the final boss of this expansion, The Burning Crusade. He is the Supreme Commander of the Burning Legion, and is also known as the creator of the Lich King.

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]

The WotLK Beta has changed builds once again, and is currently at Build 8788. There were only two changes to the talents this time. A change to Torment the Weak and a change to Fingers of Frost. The biggest chance however is a brand new spell to replace our Shatter Shield spell, which was replaced by a Frost Talent.

For the new Mage spell, Blizzard pulls one out of the pages of Naruto’s techniques, and gives us Shadow Clones. The new spell for Mages at level 80 is now, Mirror Image!

Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!

I am not sure if these images will mimic whatever you do, or do their own thing. Doesn’t say if they will actually do damage or just a percentage of damage, or none at all. If this is meant to be a spell which creates decoys for you, does this cause enemies to de-target you when you cast it like Feign Death? There is still a lot of unknowns about this spell, so hopefully we learn more about it soon.

The new change to Torment the Weak makes it so that it affects “Ensnared” targets instead of “Slowed” targets. That means it works on targets affected by Curse of Exhaustion and Chill, which is from Ice Armor.

*edit* It looks like all Frost spells with a chill affect will be considered a “Ensnared” effect now. You can see how it shows up now in the default UI. Here you can see it popping up with Frostfire Bolt (with a new animation). Found the video thanks to Spooncraft.com

The newest version of Fingers of Frost now reverts back to the older version, but with a much shorter duration. Instead of your next two Frost damage spells, it is your next Frost damage spells for 4 seconds. This means you can squeeze in two Frostbolts and maybe an Ice Lance during that duration. You “should” be in the middle of casting a Frostbolt by the time your previous Frostbolt hits and procs FoF (due to travel time). So when you cast it, you’ll have another 2.5 - 3 seconds to cast another Frostbolt and Ice Lance.

With the 2008 Summer Olympics in full bloom, we watch and show our support to the athletes in Beijing who are representing our country. Of course, Blizzard has their own way of showing their support to the Olympics. They did so with “The Spirit of the Competition” event.

Go Team USA!

Not everyone is excited about the Olympics, but I have been following them whenever I have a chance. It even distracted me a bit during the Sunwell Plateau raid the other night. I am also convinced that Michael Phelps is a Druid with Aquatic Form.

By simply participating in one of the Battlegrounds (WSG, AB, EotS, AV), you will receive a [Competitor's Tabard]. With each winning Battleground you took part of, you have a chance to receive [Gold Medallion], which summons a Dragon vanity pet. You will receive your prizes by mail.

What I think would be a good idea is if Blizzard could set up some sort of Warcraft Olympics themselves. They should set it up so that each Realm would be competing against other Realms for some sort of recognition or prize. Have it so that during this event, when you queue into Battlegrounds, you enter with only players of your own Realm, and play against a team of other players of their own Realm.

Blizzard could keep records of wins/losses for every Realm, and at the end of the event, could rank each Realm. It could even work with just within your Battlegroup, but I would like to see players from more Realms for a change. I dunno, just a thought.

Utada and Mushu

M’uru is finally dead! After a little over two months of wiping over and over again, we finally got the Dark Naaru down. Even after the nerf to M’uru in the last patch, he still gave us all sorts of trouble, and was a pain in the butt to attempt.

M’uru is definitely a very difficult fight. The group composition had to be perfect, and everyone must on their game, and no mistakes can be made. Like many guilds have already said about M’uru, Blizzard has done a great job with creating this encounter.

It really pushes your raid to the limit, and when you finally kill him, you get this great feeling of taking down what many people say is the hardest boss so far in the game.

In Phase 1, you fight M’uru and his waves of adds. You need to DPS him down while at the same time deal with waves of Bloodelves which run in from two sides. There are also Voidwalkers which come out of portals which randomly appear in the room. When the Voidwalkers die, it spawns about ten Voidspawns, which need to be AoE’d down. While all this is going on, these skulls also spawn in the center of the room, which needs to be Mass Dispelled right away or they will wipe the raid.

Phase 2 starts when you get M’uru down to 0%. M’uru dies and Entropius is born. At this time, no more waves of mobs will come, but you must kill any remaining mobs that were up when M’uru is still alive. Entropius does a raid-wide shadow beam, which increases in damage the longer he is up. The raid must be able to take him out before the damage gets too high for the raid to heal through.

Loot Time! We have now already killed M’uru/Entropius twice now, so I guess you can say we now have him on farm. We actually wiped more times on Felmyst then we did on M’uru this week. Here is a list of what we got so far.

First Kill:

• [Sin'dorei Band of Triumph]
• [Sunglow Vest]
• [Gauntlets of the Soothed Soul]
• [Warharness of Reckless Fury]

Second Kill:

• [Sin'dorei Band of Dominance]
• [Ring of Hardened Resolve]
• [Steely Naaru Silver]
• [Aegis of Angelic Fortune]

Look at all that caster loot we got!! /sigh Maybe we will actually get some next week. On the bright side, we did get a lot of tanking loot, so our Main Tank is getting geared (which is always a good thing), which will make it easier for future raids.

38.5k HP fully raid buffed with a few things popped.

Now we on to the next and last boss of the current expansion, Kil’jaeden the Deceiver. Then we can say that we finally beat the game… again… until the next expansion…

Next Boss: Kil’jaeden