March Blog Posts

And apologies for my absence: It's not that there's been no news, although news has been scarce.

It's that my time is very taken up with wedding preparations. I'll be out next week actually doing the "getting married" thing, and then back the following week, when I will be back to having time for StratFu. Luckily Blizzard seems to be giving me the wedding gift I asked them for: not launching Ulduar until after 4/5, so we should be hitting Ulduar with full traction the minute it launches.

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>

Tonight the Iron Council was up on the US PTR's with the broadcasted request to "please test with Steelbreaker last." So we did, with our ragtag bunch (only had a 10-man raid -- Fusion folks have lives on Friday nights!)

We weren't exactly stacked:

Heals
Druid
Priest
Shaman

DPS
Rogue
Warlock
Mage
Mage

Tank
DK
Warrior

We were missing a bunch of caster buffs, the rogue barely got any buffs, and we didn't have any blessings. It was interesting to say the least!

That said, we killed them and got loot:

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>

Well, the much-anticipated "benefit from spirit" is here. GC wasn't quite true to his word.

He said that the goal was that we wouldn't have a DPS loss by taking gear with spirit on it, but we also wouldn't see a dps gain. He's correct we don't see a dps gain...

But it's definitely still a loss to take any gear with spirit.

The changes are:

• Molten Armor now causes 170 Fire damage when hit for all ranks (Up from 75/130/170) and also increases your critical strike rating by 25% of your spirit.
• Molten Armor glyph increases that by 15% (to a total of 40%)

It requires about 380 unbuffed spirit for glyphed Molten Armor fully-raid-buffed to still provide 5% crit.

It's a good move from a gear-homogenization perspective (how good that design is I won't go into here.) It's a "...what?" move from a mage perspective, since it doesn't really address anything at all with the class, and just brings us closer to parity with what the other cloth classes have had with itemization up until now.

Most interesting is what isn't in this patch:

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>

Screenshots of each boss, information on hard modes and achievements, plus easy access to the StratFu strats, what more could you want?

I'm a very visual person, so just making this map was good for me to get a sense of where everything was:

StratFu Ulduar: Interactive Ulduar Map

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>

Acclaimed as possibly the best boss that the US has seen, Fusion downed the 10-man version tonight (hard to get people to log in on a Friday.) There's a lot going on and each phase is different and short enough that you don't get bored. While there's a slight favoring of range DPS, if Magnetic Cores are working properly it seems like melee will be just fine on the fight.

The strategy:

StratFu Ulduar: Mimiron Strategy

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>

I recently switched from Arcane to Fire and I've been asked "why" a lot.

First off, realize that I rarely hold myself to a single spec. We have a loot system that encourages offspec gear, so I'm always gathering up unneeded gear in case I need to respec some day.

I still have my arcane gearset and if, for example, Sarth3D were still hard, and I wanted the burst of damage for Tenebron, I'd be arcane. That said....:

DPS

The thing is, on paper, Fire and Arcane do about the same DPS (arcane is ~50dps higher). Arcane can whore innervates and do more, of course, but the specs are pretty balanced on paper -- and that's the problem.

Designing a spec so it does more DPS with more effort? Awesome design. Changing that spec for pvp reasons one patch later so it doesn't actually provide more DPS but still requires better timing and more effort? Not so much.

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>

Blizzard added four new tailoring recipes which, oddly, are BoE and produce BoE items at...item level 226. All in all it's a strange choice, and we might hope to see some changes, but even as it stands now there's something worthwhile there.

First, the recipes:

Waist: Cord of the White Dawn (spi/dmg/crit)
Waist: Sash of Ancient Power (hit/dmg/haste)
Feet: Savior's Slippers (spi/dmg/crit)
Feet: Spellslinger's Slippers (spi/dmg/haste)

All have two sockets on them. Specific comments below the cut.

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>

Today the StratFu videos collectively reached a million downloads from Warcraft Movies: Warcraft Movies: Hall of Fame

Thanks everyone for watching and giving me the encouragement as I've been building StratFu. Thanks also to the various people who have stepped up and made contributions, be they small or large.

We also hit another milestone recently: 100k page views (although it's dropped back down since then, that was just Ulduar high spirits!)

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>

Well... here's some scribbled notes.

There's really no point in a full strategy since it's clear the fight is bugged. If he's on the PTR again, it'll be more interesting and there will be something more to write about.

StratFu Ulduar: Ignis Strategy Edit: A more comprehensive, detailed strategy is now available.

Rather than killing what was clearing a pillowcase we opted to play around with the adds and other mechanics the whole time to figure out exactly how heat/molten/brittle worked.

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>

How to be good PTR testers:

• Try various ways to break the encounter to find bugs
• Experiment with all fight mechanics
• Wipe liberally -- it's PTR who cares
• Try to find enrage mechanics
• See what the hard modes look like
• Do crazy things

How to be a bad PTR tester:

• Rush to get a "world first PTR kill" and don't learn enough to give feedback beyond "my epeen is soooo big!"

Pro-tip: you're on the PTR to try stuff that will improve everyone's experience on live.

>>>>>>> READ MORE AND COMMENTS >>>>>>>>