CB Editorial: The State of WoW.

Sneak peek intro screen from Waterfalls/Exploration movie currently in edit phase:

CB06: Waterfalls Exploration

GOING UP:

Quick easy full epix as soon as you hit level cap (til Cata).

5p dungeons double-pull AOE fests (til Cata).

Battlegroup-wide instanced content where you know exactly what you’re gonna get

Linear, predictable gameplay with predictable, “safe” reward paths

Number of players who don’t know how to find the instance entrance after a wipe.

Number of players who don’t know what zone the instance is in (dude, that’s “RP lore” stuff! LOL11!)

Teleports

Complaints about not enough teleports

Loading screens

Flying mounts in your noob zone, in Undercity, in Ironforge and in your mom’s kitchen. Everywhere, pretty much.

People hanging out AFK on their flying mount waiting for something

QQ on the forums about players who AIR GANK these people on PVP servers.

Tol Barad

QQ about the Tol Barad buffs being too generous

QQ about the Tol Barad buffs being useless

WG-style not-instanced-BG-but-damn-near in every expansion so we can have a separate, sterile, designated “fair” pvp environment so pvp’ers won’t interfere in the rest of Azeroth.

Warrior/DK/Pally people with access to 25 Primordial Saronite and an Arthas-killing PuG

Shadowmourne-based arena teams

Caster legendary – coming “Soon” ™

Short BGs.

Rated BGs

Rated BGs drama and complaints.

Instanced pvp in general

Funny crazy Goon Squad antics in BGs.

Casual raiding 2 nights/week

Player health pools

Steady, large amounts of damage

Steady, large amounts of healing

Mana-draining

Obvious boss emotes to lessen the need for boss timer addons

Haste

Mastery

Reforging

Smart itemization (them devs are getting good yo)

Emblems and currency rewards

Get in a guild or bust.

Loading screens north of EPL so you can’t swim under Ghostlands anymore

Different endgame character progression avenues

Worgen

Gobbos

People gushing about the awesome new starting experience for Wolves and Gobbos

Population of the Exodar

Heroic everything. (Heroic Pop-Tarts? Heroic Urmomlol? Ultra-Heroics?)

Multiple difficulty levels for everything in instances.

Green Fire-glyphed/specced warlocks

Number of times Anub’Arak has featured in an instance

New Blizzard MMO rumours.

Players switching servers/faction/race/class/appearance at the drop of a hat.

Proc-based weapons (yeay!)

Balancing problems from proc-based weapons. (meh.)

Wolvar faction

.

STAYING ABOUT THE SAME GIVE OR TAKE

Players complaining that Blizzard hates their class and ruined/broke the game.

Overall dps and tanking and healing balance in raids and 5v5, 3v3 and BGs (the game’s never been more balanced, folks)

Players not understanding that gear not on someone’s “BiS” list isn’t automatically useless for you.

Official forums set up to encourage http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/ type behaviour.

Wowhead doing a great job of encouraging funny/insightful posts and making abusive posts easy to report

Complaints about Ensidia and other “top” guilds

Kungen complaining about Blizzard not catering to the hardcore raiding scene.

Kill rates on faction leaders

Number of temporary buff procs you have on at any one time (Ugh.)

Honorfarming in BGs to gear up for arenas/rated BGs

World events that spread the server and location load (no more AQ gates heh)

Achievements for everything (did you manage to put your socks on this morning? GJ! *DING!*)

Funny achievements with suggestive names (take three bosses, tie in a knot, MT jumps in circle backwards while warlock stands in fire *DING!*)

Warlock complaining about no new demons

Warrior complaining about scaling

QQ about no legendaries for “your” spec

Honor Cap (til Cata)

Number of players who have a hard time in arenas initially and say “**** this, outta here”

Wow.com blog marketshare making the mainstream pay attention

Other wow-related blogs getting blown up by a link from Wow.com

GM workloads on PVP and RP servers.

Bada** pvp’ers running around inside opposing-faction cities.

Phishing emails containing a legit-looking link to a website with a one-letter difference from a Blizzard website or something official-sounding

“something something …WAS MERELY A SETBACK!” jokes when Kael’Thas comes back as a janitor for Deathwing

“Anyone who agrees is a despicable fanboy – anyone who disagrees is a despicable hater” -type attitudes.

Players posting “@GC” threads.

Blizzard employees fighting the Tseric burn-out syndrome

Players getting owned for doing dumb stuff on the forums like http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?sid=1&topicId=5974349555&pageNo=1&ST=US-4541190-CMaTctbiXgpEsgxjhqhxctqlDciTBc2IZrp

The nerfbat pendulum swinging back and forth every patch.

People posting useless lists

People posting funny flowcharts like Vertidog’s http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e388/vertidog/catdps.jpg

Bugs

Usage of http://lmgtfy.com/ so people can learn how to learn

http://coldbear.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/coldbear-vs-zarhym-on-blizzard-forums/

.

GOING DOWN:

Ragnaros (AGAIN)

Server communities

Faction pride

Brostorm+Puppies+blowallcooldowns arena strategies.

Complaints about arena after patch 4.0 (…fewer and fewer non-hardcore arena players)

Alliance raids every once in a blue moon on Tarren Mill just for the hell of it.

Use of PVE gear outside of PVE raids for most, but not all, classes (except trinkets and weapons)

Arenas and competitive small-group instanced pvp

Wintergrasp

Outland content

Northrend content

Shattrath

Aldor & Scryers

Dalaran (they’ll make ever more portals in the main cities or Dalaran will remain the hub of hubs)

World bosses

People setting their hearth anywhere but a major city

World pvp rewards

World pvp achievements

World pvp lip-service recognition like the Silithus sand fiasco

Being able to initiate world pvp on pvp servers

Players who know what the term “world pvp” means

Lolburstlol (thank god)

Paladin survivability

The population of Blood Elf paladins (Has to happen eventually – can’t go any higher.)

Arena rogues with 100% ArPen (funny while it lasted, though, as long as you weren’t on the receiving end)

ArPen

Melee dps positioning requirements (only one skill left lol)

Bossmod timer bar addons (still the first thing you download after joining your first raiding guild)

PVP outside instance entrances

MP5

Attack Power

Block Value

Defense

Spell Power

15 different emblem types (yeay!)

SS-TM battles just for the hell of it by a bunch of old farts

Raid or die

“Passive” talents

Content that might block anyone from seeing instance X/boss Y/content Z (good and bad imo)

“PVP happened on a PVP server” posts

Gorloc fascist apologists thinking they can silence the truth about despicable Gorloc war crimes. Any who support of the Gorlocs are racists and have small brains. You can’t dispute it. It’s science.

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EJ “Best-in-Slot” lists vs. Rawr

• http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=83318

People on EJ like to theorycraft these “Dream Team” gearsets that 99% of the WoW playerbase will never completely put together. Usually they start doing this when the content that drops the items and the items themselves aren’t completely implemented yet. They are understandably concerned with figuring out absolute max performance with best possible gear on a level with that available to the top 100 most-progressed guilds.

Regular players such as me and you see these idiotically-named “Best-In-Slot” castles in the sky and think that anything not on that list then obviously must not be worth spending dkp or karma or rolling on.

If you’re one of those 1% of players who can reasonably expect to gather every single item they could possibly want for their mainspec in a specific tier of content before the next content is out – then by all means, follow the “BiS” list crowd and avoid upgrades that could help you but aren’t on the list while you’re collecting the listed gear, and then possibly be optimal after you’re done, just in time for the next raid instance.

Or – you can trust Rawr to figure out what’s best for YOU. Right NOW. In YOUR situation. Based on YOUR available gear, YOUR available raidbuffs/debuffs – keeping in mind that Rawr has limitations.

…Such as not being all that for dynamic fight analysis (yet), occasionally not immediately modelling a newly-released item mechanic correctly – or an item mechanic that keeps changing, like Nibelung or Deathbringer’s Will. It’ll take a bit of time until stuff like that is correctly modelled. And there’s bugs. And it’s confusing. And it’s decidedly NOT newbie- or user-friendly, despite claims to the contrary by the developers.

Final analysis:

Educate yourself on Rawr’s model and items. Understand why people on EJ do what they do with these lists. Then make an informed decision taking into account all available data.

Just because it’s at the top of the list for your current character, as it presently stands, does not mean it’s a BiS item per the lists posted on EJ. It means that that item would give your character the most benefit for what you have set up. If you were to move stats around and drop Hit Rating, that would certainly change what showed as top of the list on various slots as that would change what items give you the most DPS.

– Jothay, Developer

BiS lists are silly.  Those items are BiS in those slots IF AND ONLY IF you have all the other items in all the other slots.  So really BiS lists are not terribly useful except in very long term gear planning decisions.Rawr will advise you about what the best move for your character is NOW.  EJ tends to try to answer the question “What is the best set I can possibly have if I had everything”.  You can answer that question in Rawr too but it’s not as simple.  The models may also vary a little but that’s neither here nor there and can’t be easily quantitatively measured.

- khantal

Q: Did you ever completely fill out your “dream sheet” of gear from any one raid instance or tier of gear before the next raid or next tier was released?

If Yes – then go mess with BiS lists.

If No – then you’re with me and 99% of the rest of wow players. Not that Rawr is perfect. It’s confusing and unwieldy and a mess if you’re on a Mac like me and it’s waaaay too hard to figure out how to mess with “Gemming Templates” and whatnot. “Templates”?? Hey – I just wanna play the game, maaaan!

Another alternative is Toskk’s Dps Gear Calculator and Askmrrobot.com, but both of those have their own limitations. And SimulationCraft for the extreme computer/math guys. But that’s not me.

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I’m a Blizzard apologist. LoL.

Blizzard’s development team on all their games are comprised of people.

(Revolutionary insight, right? Bear with me… no pun intended.)

People make mistakes.

I make mistakes. Sometimes in my line of work when people make mistakes they die or other people die.

Luckily that’s not the case when game developers make mistakes. Blizzard has a QA team. I have no idea how big or well-funded/staffed it is, but it’s there and they’re working. I’m sure Ensidia would prefer if they worked harder and fixed the buggy end-boss encounters before Ensidia gets banned after beating buggy encounters – exploit or no exploit (I will believe that they deliberately bypassed intended game mechanics when I see proof of that in a chat log or vent recording or detailed report from the GMs watching their kill). I would also prefer if they caught every single bug with every new patch and expansion.

But that’s not happening. The latest patch introduced some good pvp shoulders on a new vendor in Wintergrasp. Do WG, eventually get enough marks to buy ilvl 251 pvp shoulders. Except the druid stuff only has the healer and offensive caster versions. The feral shoulders were marked “Class: Rogue” when they should have been marked “Class: Rogue, Druid” in the game item files thingamajiggy computer stuff that I have no clue about.

Internet searches later it’s been posted about by numerous irate customers and we eventually got a response on the EU forums.

• http://www.worldofraids.com/wow-blue-tracker/eu-forums/12304215550-where-s-the-feral-shoulders-from-new-wg.html

This is what I posted prior to the acknowledgment that it was, indeed, a bug that would eventually get fixed (thread got locked – for no good reason imo):

• http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=22748822970&postId=229809015934&sid=1#6

They've gotten tons of bug reports and a few threads on this forum.
 It's 1/30 specs that's affected.
 It may or may not be hotfixxable.
 They'll get to it, I'm sure - just they've got worse things at the
 moment with buggy end-of-expansion boss encounters and whatnot.
 Yeah, sucks for those like me who went to the trouble of busting into
 losing WG's for a day or two only to find that
 PSYCHE!
 ...no shoulders.
 Oh well.
 Soon (tm).

Now for the FUNNY PART. A reader of this blog – Druan of <Lemmings> on Ner’zhul:

Coldbear, much as I enjoy your blog and Feral play guides, why are you such a Blizzard apologist in these situations? They’ve made a mistake and should have measures in place to fix the problem in a timely manner.
Mistakes will be made in a game this large, stuff will get overlooked. The real issue is Blizzard’s unwillingness to fix it in a timely fashion.
If the “fix” requires an onerous process or complicated client-side patch, that is none but Blizzard’s responsibility for coding the game the way it is. Blizzard’s time would be well invested streamlining their ability to fix bugs, any up-front effort would pay off many times over in the ability to fix future issues quickly.

Apologist?? No offense, mate – you seem like a smart guy. But that was kinda funny.

All I can say is scroll down a bit and you’ll see my forum ban for criticizing blue posters. That should give me a bit of “street cred”, right? I guess the major difference me and this guy has (Hi, btw! Thanks for the kind words about the blog + videos!), is what really constitutes “…a timely fashion.”

To me, that’s like a week or two after they’re made aware of the issue – unless it’s absolutely game-breaking for people. As is, this affects a very small part of the player base, isn’t high profile (like the Lich King fight, they ****ed up pretty good with Ensidia on that) and there’s other options available. If you really need pvp shoulders you can pick stuff up for Honor or Emblems of Triumph (or Arena Points in a while). Ok, so those alternatives aren’t as good and the other specs/classes will have a slight advantage while we wait. But it’ll hold you over for a week or two.

Now for the JUICY PART.

The game is tons better now than it was at launch. At launch, when you chose your class you chose your fate. Warlocks were useless transportation services mostly. Warriors were tanks. No-one else was allowed to tank. Druids were healers and sucked the big donkey at pvp. Rogues were unstoppable ganking machines. Paladins buffed and healed. A geared raider was unbeatable. Anyone without raidgear sucked. It took forever to get bugs fixed and class issues were on a patch-by-patch one “class review patch” after the other. But it was fun and addictive and the WORLD was a huge and exciting place full of adventure and danger and WAR.

Now the class balance has never been better – it’s tons easier for casual raiders and pvp’ers and solo artists and 5-player dungeon runners to have fun at endgame. Classes are largely working as they should in pvp and pve. Sure there are issues.

Ferals in arena? Yeah, they exist. Or so I’ve heard. Either I just suck at arena or the spec is too hard to arena with – or a bit of both.

Some specs have damage issues in pve? Yep, sure is the case. Rake is a bit of a messed-up and NOT FUN mechanic atm, but less so than other spec’s mechanics iirc. It’s a bit late in the expansion cycle to make major overhauls, though. Hopefully they can incrementally fix some issues at least.

You hardly ever see anyone out in the WORLD anymore. You hardly know people ON YOUR OWN SERVER ANYMORE. It’s all battlegroup-wide this instance or that instance or queue for BG this or that now. They’re slowly killing off the server communities that used to develop. Now it’s your guild and not much else on your server, and then just random people you meet and never meet again. Good luck developing the kind of deep-seated guild rivalries or personal nemesis relationships that existed back then. You’d be hard-pressed to make a server-wide reputation outside of running instances anymore. I know there’s good pvp’ers on my realm – I just never see them. They’re in arenas or …whatever arena players do when they’re not in arenas. WHERE DID ALL THE PEOPLE GO? You know – the people that used to be in the WORLD of warcraft??

Teleports are everywhere.

Log in. Teleport. Instance. Teleport. Log out. Repeat. Not exactly the WORLD of WAR …craft that I was sold on.

CONCLUSION:

I’ve got some major issues with where they’re taking this game – away from the WORLD and the WAR and the SERVER COMMUNITIES and towards instant battlegroup content that’s all instanced and “safe” and linear and very predictable and gives the player an almost certain expectation of reward. But they’re fixing the class issues and bugs faster and better than they ever have, and they seem to be getting better at that. That said – I’d rather hear “Soon ™ ” and “When It’s Done” than have to deal with crap like this shoulders issue.

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Best of WoW 18: Lich King bugs, Ensidia, Tigole

Read Muqq’s post about Ensidia’s world first kill of Lich King 25man (buggy encounter, use of Saronite Bombs etc):

• http://ensidia.com/muqq/blog/4078/

Then – and this is the fairly hilarious thing, read Tigole’s post from way back when in Legacy of Steel EQ days (scroll all the way down):

• http://www.legacyofsteel.net/oldsite/arc27.html

Ahhh, I love the smell of drama in the morning!

I disagree with a lot of the things Muqq said. For starters the game is tons better today than it was at launch – mostly – with the exception of maybe world pvp as far as I’m concerned. But you can’t deny that Blizz, who supposedly pride themselves on Soon ™ and polished content and the “When It’s Done” philosophy – really did release a very bugged Lich King encounter and then banned the raid who completed it while it was still bugged – whether or not the one rogue who was using the Saronite Bombs that were causing the bug knew – or whether the rest of the raid knew – that they were clearly making the encounter significantly easier than intended. Until proven that the raiders knowingly exploited a bugged mechanic (show me chat logs, or a vent recording of them saying “hai guise – every time I drop a Saronite bomb the platform rebuilds itself – should we continue to exploit this?”) then I’m inclined to side with the people who did NOT release bugged content that had been inadequately tested.

Dropping Saronite Bombs as extra dps in a raid environment is an expensive thing to do, but it was clearly something that was very regularly done by this rogue. That the Blizzard QA team didn’t know about this mechanic and therefore didn’t test it is an indication that the QA team needs to be more aware of how players play the game. It should not be the responsibility of the players to alert the QA team on how to maximize their dps.

They fixed it quick. But it’s still just as bad as what Tigole had to deal with back in the day.

So mega points to Muqq for a well written parody post. And points given to Blizzard for a good game and hotfixing issues quickly – points then taken away for banning a raid for creative use of game mechanics and releasing bugged VERY HIGH PROFILE content.

I wouldn’t have care much if this was a bug issue on Festergut or Rotface. But Arthas? The Lich KING? Come on, this is the biggest bad guy you’ve ever set up to fall in the story of the game and the previous games and the game world.

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BigWigs and How CB Stopped Sucking On Putricide.

• Plug – Director’s Cut Music Video Version of last film: http://www.filefront.com/15356503/CB05.5%20Director%27s%20Music%20Video%20Cut.mp4

• PRO Prof. Put. TIP (try saying that fast and out loud ten times): Use the double-pot trick if you know your tank is good and will use it, too, or if you’ll get Vigilance or w/e. Idea is to pop a Potion of Speed a second or two (easy if he gives you a countdown) before you all go into combat. The timer starts and you’ll be able to use a second potion later in the fight. How much extra dps? I dunno, dude. I just work here. Get off my back. Go talk to a manager or something.

Maybe you do, but I personally don’t particularly enjoy fiddling with raid timer addons. I don’t like addons. I don’t like BigWigs. Yes, I’m grumpy. I much prefer DBM (resource hog?), and would like to try out Deus Vox Encounters. Or just go no-addon if Blizz ever gets around to making things so obvious and so unpredictable that raid timer addons go out of business as far as being useful goes. Yeah, I’d like a pony, too – but I sure as hell ain’t getting a pony or a chance to raid without timer bar addons anytime soon. You’d be either ridiculously stupid to try, or ridiculously skilled to succeed.

I’m not ridiculously skilled as I’m sure you noticed if you read my last post.

Professor Putricide kinda puts this **** on the spot since it’s so bloody dynamic and complicated and there’s crap on top of the crap on top of the crap on the floor.

1. Abomination blocking your view.
2. Boss facing changes every second.
3. Tank dragging boss around.
4. Mob pathing bug introduced in 3.3 that makes them behave badly and sometimes go off to the side of the tank a bit when he moves – or even behind him.
5. Two sets of adds that require wildly different responses from you and the raid.
6. Choking Gas Bomb vials on the ground.
7. Ground covered in green stuff.

But yeah, I finally figured out how to not suck at this. I will from now on not be anywhere near the top of the list of people who got hit the most by Malleable Goo or Choking Gas Bomb.

Here’s how to set it up in BigWigs, right-click and select “View Image” to see the settings since I haven’t figured out how to do thumbnails yet bloody hell:

Audio file on how to set up BigWigs for this fight that may or may not help you and/or your guildies:

• http://www.filefront.com/15433475/bigwigsputricide.mp3/

Why does my guild use BigWigs? I guess it’s a bit of a left-over from previous guild leaders, plus on this fight it does actually seem to have an edge on DBM in that it can output chatbubbles in /say over the top of the heads of people targeted by Malleable Goo. I’m sure your guild is much more skilled than mine. And I don’t really care. I raid to see cool stuff and hang out with friends.

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Humble Pie?

YES PLEASE.

Don’t ever tell your guild that you’re not gonna wipe the raid again this night – like you did last night. On the limited-attempt boss. Right before the very first attempt of the night.

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CB Guide: How To Get Things Done.

• Plug – Director’s Cut Music Video Version of last film: http://www.filefront.com/15356503/CB05.5%20Director%27s%20Music%20Video%20Cut.mp4

You want something in game.

Easy groups.
Easy access to raid bosses.
Gear.
Action.
Arena Rating.
Guild membership.
More dps
Be a better tank
Be a better healer
More gold
More Primordial Saronite or “Resource Whatever”.
Legendary this or Legendary that.

• Option 1:

sit on your *** and complain and hope that mommy or daddy will hear or someone will come hold your hand

• Option 2:

Figure out who might possibly be interested in the same damn thing.
Figure out who amongst those might be good resources or are already good at this
Figure out who might be – not good, but reliable/decent enough – to get better/accomplish the same things you want, alongside you.

Google is your friend most of the time. Among 10-15million players someone’s probably already solved your issue and posted something on the internet about how they did it. There’s guides for every class, role and spec. If you don’t use easily available information then you’re damned to always having to figure things out on your own.

Who’s good for your PuG raid on instance X, Y or VOA? Hmmm… probably people in already established raiding guilds, or people who are already experienced at this kind of PuG or that kind of content.

http://www.wowprogress.com/pve/us/ravenholdt

/who majestas
/who the dark passion
/who hand of the gods
/who syndicate

/whisper
Ctrl+C
Ctrl+V

Or you can just use the Elitist Group addon. Or any of the many other addons that will give you info about a player. Or look them up on QuickArmory and check their achievements/gearlevel.

BUT WAAAAAH THESE PEOPLE ARE ALL JERKS WAAAAAH AND DON’T LET ME IN WAAAAAH

It’s ok, little girl. Daddy’s here to help you.

Google your class + role + guide

or “how to”

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=warlock+dps+guide
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=warrior+tanking+how+to
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=boomchicken+I+don%27t+understand+how+to+fire+my+lazer
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=i%27m+a+rogue+and+my+dps+sucks+and+they+make+fun+of+me
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=tanks+get+all+the+girls
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+is+katzeus+such+an+arse+WAITLISTING+ME
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+solo-heal+Arthas+on+25p+heroic+ultra+hard+mode

Get better. Get all the easily available emblem gear. Do VOA every reset. Get in on the GDKP runs. Study. Learn. Research. Organize things yourself, and learn how to do it. Get a reputation.

.

Ok, fine. So this doesn’t work all that awesome if all you want is Arena Rating 9000 because you just got spanked by Swol and Lupelupeluuu. Witness my grand arena rating of exactly… *drumroll* …170.
.
But you can still google some guides and How-To things on getting started on arena stuff. You’ll find SOMETHING useful. Then make some friends and see if you can’t solve problems together instead of each one of you by yourself.

Point is:

Sit on your *** and get NOTHING done, and get NO sympathy from ***holes like me.

OR

Take charge and go make some money, do your research, get in a good guild, buy up 25 Primordial Saronite from wherever and then BAM you’ve got Shadow’s Edge and you’re going places. And then find yourself being asked to go do stuff instead of you doing all the asking.

Lastly, don’t b**** about not getting what you want if you’ve never led a raid or taken the lead in getting pvp organized. Start doing that and you’ll learn a ton of stuff, real fast. Especially about having to balance competing priorities and whiny little kids who are used to solving their problems by crying to mommy.

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Feral Dps Guide Video UPDATED!

• Director’s Cut Music Video Version: http://www.filefront.com/15356503/CB05.5%20Director%27s%20Music%20Video%20Cut.mp4

Released late last night. Plugged it on a bunch of forums and websites this morning. Now to sit back and let the Oscars committee come to me. Oooooor NOT. This isn’t exactly high-brow art – but there’s some cool visuals and good music and some fun stuff and I like it.

The music video version turned out OK and I can actually stand watching it a few times – not that there aren’t as usual fifteen different little things I’d like to fix now after the fact. A movie is never really finished – it’s just in different stages of being almost ready for release – so at some point you just gotta say “**** it – time to drop this *****”.

• ORIGINAL Guide: How To Feral DPS

http://www.filefront.com/14885557/Guide How To Feral DPS.mp4
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=130705
http://www.viddler.com/explore/parl2001/videos/2/ (Full Movie)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nuc5MhpekM (part 1 of 2)
http://www.wegame.com/watch/guide-how-to-feral-dps-part-one-of-two/ (part 1 of 2)

• Things I got wrong (update):

http://www.filefront.com/15359235/CB05.5%20Things%20I%20got%20wrong%203000.mp4

http://www.noobflicks.com/watch/8744/cb055_things_i_got_wrong
http://www.wegame.com/watch/cb05-5-things-i-got-wrong-2/

• Written Guide:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Feral_DPS_guide (hopefully to be updated by community)

…OF COURSE, THAT’S JUST MY OPINION. I COULD BE WRONG.

The original video is up to about 160,000 views now (not counting re-uploads on overseas sites), the update isn’t that big of a deal but I figured I should at least address the common complaints (like “TOO FAST OMG HEAD EXPLODE”) and fix my mistakes.

Ghostcrawler: If you want to do the best damage possible, you need to be able to master a complex rotation. This is one of the features that attracts players to the Feral spec. However, it’s also pretty forgiving. If you just Shred, you’re going to do decent damage. If you Shred and try to keep up Savage Roar, it’s going to be better. If you can also manage your Mangles and Rips and Rakes, then you have the potential to do very high damage (assuming you don’t have to move around much and can reach the target’s back).

Now – here’s the crux: I worked my butt off to make these things. I did my research. I talked to Allev, Murna, Kalon, Aranor, Astrylian, Vallen and a bunch of other smart/good ferals about this. Ok, so my opinions might be wrong about a lot of things – but there is no way in hell I can make a guide and start off with a straight face saying you don’t need addons to play this spec well – or even remotely effectively. All dps specs face this issue to some extent – but the JOHN ****ING MADDEN design of this spec more or less makes average players like myself disproportionately dependent on the addons to get the job done to an approximate level of the people I’ve leveled with, geared with and raided with for a good two years now. Yep, I’m saying it’s unfair.

The way to show your mastery of a class and skill at performing should be evident in your play – not dependent on what addons you download or how you design your UI to get short-term buffs, threat meter, debuffs, energy, combo pts, your hp, target hp, cooldowns, boss timer bars, raid frame addons all fit someplace on the screen where you can easily monitor it all quickly while getting your much-harder-than-anyone-else’s positioning requirement right as well.

Sum up:
1. tons of stuff all over the screen
+
2. one of the more complex priority lists in the game, if not THE most complex
+
3. only dps spec with positioning requirement for main attack

equals:
You simply have to have addons to be nearly as effective as other specs using no addons given approximately same skill/gear etc.

EDIT: Just found a funny little cool thing. If you go to 3:47 in the video you’ll see a FC Cat from a front camera angle – apparently the front paws get a green glow during the jump. Looks kinda cool.

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Guide: How To Get Into A Raiding Guild

Gem/Enchant your gear in accordance with tankspot/Elitist Jerks/whatever.

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/ – IS YOUR FRIEND. Sometimes people on there are wrong, but usually the good information is in a thread dedicated to your class/spec somewhere.

• More than likely we have neither the time nor the energy or inclination to teach you how to perform in a raid environment. The information is easily available on the internet at no cost other than time and effort searching – highly specialized to your class and spec.
• Take your app as seriously as you want us to take you.
• Do your bloody research, do tons of heroics, pug 10-player raids, VOA whatever.
• Be bloody flexible. If your class allows it, be able to fill two raid roles competently.
• Talk to someone of your class/roles already in the guild and ask them to check your enchants/gems. Realize that they may or may not know wtf they’re talking about, so take what they say and go check the authoritative resources on the net.
• Get your professions very high if not max’d. Money is easy to come by. 10-15 dailies per day.
• Make the following macro and hotkey it:
• /who [raiding guild name]
• Then hit that macro every time you log in to figure out what the guild is doing. Start making friends by looking at that /who list first every time you run heroics/pug 10mans/VOA. See who’s doing what and start sending polite whispers asking if they want in on the heroic daily or whatever. Persistence pays. Log in every single day and ask every single person of your class in the guild if they need the daily. A week later you’ll know a few people.
• Know what raid frames are.
• Do your research on what addons and mods raiders of your class commonly use.
• Gear counts, but a person who’s easy-going, reliable and willing to learn is worth their weight in gold.
• it’s never been easier to gear up a character. Run H-TOC and the heroic daily every day, and normal TOC til you have all the gear and both (if hybrid) trinkets you need from there.
• Be where you say you’re gonna be. Never flake on people. People flake on you, but you’re building the reputation as rock-solid reliable.
• Decide what you wanna do.
• Raid MT – long hard road ahead of you. Make sure your dps gear is just as presentable as your tank gear, and apply as a tank/dps hybrid. Don’t go heal/tank hybrid or – you guessed it – you’ll be stuck healing. Then you’ve got a few months of building a reputation as a reliable OT/replacement tank inside the guild before something happens and now you’re MTing. Maybe. Probably not, but there’s a chance.
• Healer – Not as important to have good dps gear, since you’ll probably be healing. But it never hurts to be able to tell the people organizing stuff that their job just became easier since you can switch spec/role.
• Dps hybrid – as a person who occasionally deals with organizing crap, I can’t tell you how nice it is to hear several people in the raid say they can switch roles to fill the gap that just opened up. Alts are nice, but rarely as geared as your hybrid main.
• Dps pure – you’d better know your **** if you want in as a hunter/rogue/DK or whatever is the FOTM around here. Your website resources had better be bookmarked and you need to be up on the latest changes to what your gearing/spec priorities are.
• Last thing before you app: double-check your spell rotation, your mods and your enchants/gems. Applicant with weird/haphazard gem choices – probably didn’t take the time to go research his class and what works in PVE raiding.

HOW NOT TO GET INTO A DECENT RAIDING GUILD:

Q: Post a link to your armory or profile in pve spec/gear.

A1: <name without hyperlink>*

* All 71 talent points in one tree.

A2: <rogue, name withheld> with +1 Agi wrist enchant

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Nerfbat Pendulum

Plug: http://www.wowwiki.com/Feral_DPS_guide

(credit to Darkside and Neone) showing the "top40 DPS on Festergut from WoL's database for each spec and compute the average DPS + standard deviation for each"

DPS and encounter mechanics swing back and forth. Have fun stressing about it, I guess. Personally I’ll just chill here working on my own stuff and taking a bit of Personal Pride ™ in the non-dps-related high-skillcap stuff I do, like timely combat rezzes/Innervates. And shut the hell up to anyone that says “Class X brings no utility”. L2P and learn buffs/debuffs and class synergies like Misdirection/Hysteria/Tricks etc.

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