Krez, one of our hunters, put together this guide to how he made justin.tv show good, high-quality video (on a Windows-based system.)
Archive for February, 2009
Speculation on hard modes, Algalon
Images used in this post are from MMO-Champion, one of the finer WoW resources on the ‘net.
Interesting stuff about 3.1 content continues to pop out of the woodwork if one knows where to look. WoW Forums, EJ, and probably other loci of WoW discussion have started to take a look at the datamined quests from the PTR. There’s quite a lot of juicy stuff in there for the purposes of Ulduar, mostly centering around the Archivum- a room that looks exactly like the Brann Bronzebeard event room in Halls of Stone and opens after a raid defeats the Iron Council event (which guilds on the US PTR tested 27 February- grats to those who downed it). The quest descriptions data scraped by WoWHead offer tantalizing hints about some of the raid encounters not yet seen.
After the jump- hints about future hard modes, and a surprising finding about the Algalon the Observer boss. Possible SPOILERS ahead.
Iron Council strategy
The latest boss from the US PTR:
StratFu Ulduar: The Iron Council Strategy Guide
Working on screenshots and even a movie this time. More updates as I have them.
Thorim notes
Hey, guys, this isn’t a strategy! We’re all US-based so didn’t get a chance to engage him.
What it is: our collected notes and opinions as well as information we’ve gathered from other sources, just have a place to look.
Why? Because one, we’d like the reference to see what Blizzard does change between now and live, and two, we like to think about fights even if we haven’t had a chance to do them and we figure others might like that as well.
Hodir issues
(This is a follow-up to previous posts in the blog about Hodir. If you’re not basically familiar with the mechanics of the fight, some of this post may or may not be gibberish- check out our previous Hodir coverage.)
I made a post on the WoW R&D forums regarding my feedback on the Hodir fight from our experiences last night. Armchair game design is always fun and I do see some things with the fight that need fixing. I’m reposting here with additional commentary as naturally brevity was of the essence on the WoW Forums thread.
After some discussion the WoW forums thread seemed to settle on the assessment that the the fight is too easy in its current form. I disagree. Yes, it’s quite easy to beat the 9 minute enrage- though still harder than most or all Naxx fights. That’s fine and probably intended behaviour. The 9 minute timer is fairly generous, requiring only 66,666 RDPS to defeat. Raids who are up to Hodir (who could be as late as the 8th-11th boss done in the instance) will probably be geared enough to handle this without the aid of the NPCs. In fact, on 9 minute you can basically choose to ignore the NPCs and still make it, and some guilds on PTR last night did just that, reaching health thresholds like 20% before Ulduar came down for the night. Ostensibly, the fight design is that you must utilize the NPCs to make the 6 and 3 minute checks, but don’t need them for 9 minutes. There’s nothing bad about this per se; it’s actually pretty elegant. However, there are problems with the hard mode tuning and design.
The Art of Learning: Hodir
I got asked to write up a description of how we handled things tonight on the PTR, walking into a boss where we had no information and getting him to the point where we were convinced the next pull we’d kill him (GM’s seemed to be also, since they shut off him at that point when many guilds were one pull away from success.)
Raiding on the PTR is a lot about putting yourself in a mind to deal with the usual bugs of raw encounters combined with huge lag and crashing — and this PTR didn’t leave us disappointed in that regard.
The Prep
We’ve been prepping ever since we knew 3.1 was coming: everyone had instructions to copy characters over to both pvp and pve the minute copies were available. We didn’t much around with getting consumables etc. We posted on the forums each time copies were up and even pause both a raid and an interview with an applicant to make sure people copied.
We expected the PvP server to be our preference: more casuals go to the pve server where they don’t have to worry about being ganked, and things remain decently quiet on the PvP server because most folks just want to get in and experience the new content.
They’re up!
As soon as the PTR’s were up, everyone made sure they downloaded each patch as soon as they could, to avoid any delays whenever Ulduar might be available. We formed a guild and gave everyone invite privileges to streamline that obnoxious process.
Read the rest of this entry »
Hodir strategy posted
The caveat here is this all may change. We don’t know what changes Blizzard may make to the fight as a result of tonight’s testing. That said, the fight seemed easy but decently balanced and there were no bugs we saw — so it may go live unchanged.
StratFu Ulduar: Hodir Strategy
In summary: nice fight. Some re-used mechanics but also some new ones. It’s a pure execution fight where good play means you can bring fewer healers means you can do more DPS means you can do the hard mode more easily.
Inside, Ulduar is incredible. Arguably too big without portals, but those may be added later. The textures are solid (and new in many cases: we haven’t seen ice like that leading up to Hodir), the architecture is sweeping, and it’s a zone you very much want to explore.
It also has the nice feature that there’s very different looking areas inside of it, so you won’t get as visually bored as can happen in zones that are more molten-core-esque.
Protodrakes removed; commentary on Immortal
In a good precedent, Blizzard is removing the protodrakes from the current Glory/Heroic:Glory achievements, although they will be part of equivalent achievements for Ulduar:
https://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15443184457&sid=1
I think this is a good move. It remains to be seen whether the new protodrakes will be the same or different — since different means they appeal to the achievement-oriented crowd as well.
I’m hoping they learned from feedback during T7 and will remove the Immortal/Undying achievements as well (or rather: not have them show up in Ulduar), although I fear they won’t. It’s not that we can’t get those achievements (obviously we can, we all have protodrakes), but they have the following fatal (I believe) flaws:
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How Fusion almost failed
Ever wonder how guilds become good? How Fusion went from rerolling and not finishing Naxx to getting US 11th KJ and US 8th for Sarth3D?
The following is taken from a realm forum post where the initial topic was “LOL WHICH GUILD DISBANDS FIRST” which then turned into an actually good discussion of what makes a guild survive. (the quoted section is from a fellow named Streamer.)
Bazz is a pretty honest, ego-less guy, and I’ve never known him to paint a picture to make himself seem better — he usually in fact does the reverse, talking about how poorly a raid went, for example, when there were only a small handful of problems.
The story is actually pretty similar to business stories, where the guy who founded it may not be the best guy to lead it through becoming a solid, respectable business.
Bazz’s style is a little rambling, but it’s still a good read.
Everyone uses Fusion as some example well I’ve been on the server since it was created. Fusion was not the Top guild and Bazz was not the leader when they first were over here. Through these 3 years of hard work they have actually become something exceptional which is great but only aim for the moon when you have a rocket capable of actually making it.
Yes wanting to be a top 50 guild is a nice gal but doing it is a process which can not be instantly satisfied. If you start a guild now it probably won’t even happen in WOTLK you might actually only break ground when we are all level 100/ But so what if you truly want to lead a guild your the captain of a ship that sails through any weather. Its not always going to be sunny skies all the way through.
I figured I could comment on this, since you guys are talking about guild failings etc. I can tell you where Fusion has almost failed, and perhaps explain to you in some ways that I believe have helped us to succeed.
First – What Streamer says above is true. The original Guild Leader tag was held by Bosch when we rerolled here. I suppose I should back up a bit for those curious…
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Videos from the 3.1 (Ulduar) MPQ’s
Sapp, who plays as Accountant, a paladin in NI on Detheroc posted today on EJ some fun videos he made from the 3.1 MPQ’s. I especially am amused by the Clockwork Giant dancing!
I got bored so I spent a while hunting around in the MPQs looking for cool stuff. Here are some videos I made.
Kologarn dying. He has separate models for his arms which appear to float around him, and appears to just be a torso sticking out of the ground… only his death animation animates properly, though.
Kologarn-death.avi Download File on FileFront
A door opening I thought looked really cool. It’s got the sigil of Freya, Mimir, Hodir, and Thorim. And it opens into a constellation-y place.
sigildoor.avi Download File on FileFront
Aaaand… the Clockwork Giant boss. Dancing.
Clockwork_Giant_Dancing.avi Download File on FileFront
His spellcasts look like he’s throwing craps. I’ll make more videos if requested.
