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Hate being out during progression but not much you can do when you already have plane tickets.

Good luck in ICC everyone, I'll be lying on the beach in Hawaii with something alcoholic in hand in less than 24 hours!

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Read through Eyonix's post at Cataclysm Stat & System Changes for the context of this, if you haven't already.

Obviously there's some great stuff for casters here: No more trying to make spirit work for casters and less healer/caster gear contention.

But I think there's some significant concerns as well. This is just my first set of impressions after reading Eyonix's post.

All casters still on the same system

The biggest is that, of course, we're still all locked into identical stats as casters. Other games had INT casters versus WIS casters, like melee have AGI versus STR. We're all INT casters here.

So all the common items, including trinkets, are still in high contention by a large subset of your raid. Blizzard has so far been unwilling to adjust drop rates to reflect this, resulting in very low caster gear averages relative to their melee, tank, and holy paladin counterparts.

They also talked about making haste more valuable for melee (a good move) but nothing about crit for casters. I wonder if we'll see talent changes to make crit more attractive to casters: higher multipliers, dots critting as baseline everywhere.

I think the only caster who even approaches liking crit is fire mages, and there it's, at very best, equal to haste.

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This is copied from Eyonix's post, which is here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23425636414&sid=1

As many of you know from panels at last year’s BlizzCon and posts here on the forums since then, Cataclysm will bring about major changes to familiar character stats such as Intellect, Armor Penetration, Defense, and others, ultimately designed to make the effects of stats more easily understandable and make gear choices more interesting. As these changes will have a significant impact on how stats work and relate to one another, today we wanted to offer you a closer look at exactly what’s in store and explain some of the rationale before Cataclysm arrives.

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A member of the World of Raids staff has done some good research and figured out where the malware was coming from that created the authenticator hack I posted about yesterday.

It is not, in fact, wowmatrix, but a site pretending to be.

Details at: Authenticator Keylogger Source: Fake WoWMatrix Website

Malwarebytes will detect it: http://www.malwarebytes.org/

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We knew it was technically still possible via man-in-the-middle attacks and apparently it's happening (and Blizzard is rushing to figure out a solution as they've had a few cases.)

The file that's doing it isn't being caught by virus scanners yet, but was picked up from downloading "something". It's clearly WoW-specific, not a general keylogger, and is being done by someone a lot smarter than the normal hacks: they know what items sell the best and don't first vendor the gear for piddly amounts of gold.

A fellow was online, got a memory access violation critical error. He shrugged and restarted WoW. In his words:

I tried to log in, put the correct password and authenticator code in the WoW in-game login screen. Got "wrong information" message. Tried a couple times.

Went to account management, tried to log in, got a message that the authenticator number was put in wrong a couple times and that my authenticator is locked out for the time being or something.

Went to check my system, discovered a suspicious DLL. (/users/username/appdata/Temp/emcor.dll if I recall right, ESET NOD32 didn't find it, nor did Spyware Doctor, found it using Security Task Manager, quarantined it and removed, sadly didn't bother checking anything about it, googling it doesn't return much at first glance).

Removed it etc. etc.(took me like 15 minutes).

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This is the best news I've heard in a while and certainly makes me optimistic for Cataclysm (ICC's limited attempts had managed to kill my previously-high enthusiasm for the expansion.)

Interesting that they've come out and said it was them playing nanny too, "saving guilds from themselves." This was not "to help the casuals compete better", it was just momma Blizzard saying "don't raid that much!"

From http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?sid=1&topicId=23425524394 (click through to read them all):

Q. How do you feel about the limited attempts mechanic that has been use in Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel?

A. We're not crazy about how they worked out. They were designed in essence to save players from themselves. In the past, some people would make 400+ attempts on new bosses. That's not healthy and at some point you're not measuring skill but tenacity. Yet, that's not what happened. Guilds just made alts to get around the limitations, and things like disconnects and accidents make losing an attempt really frustrating. We like gating because if nothing else it lets the community focus on more than just the final boss in the zone. If we do limited attempts again it would probably be limited to optional bosses like Algalon.

The other answer that made for a very happy mage today:

Q.

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This tool was built by Seriallos, a data whore and the GM of <Kamigami>, a serious casual (3 nights / week) guild looking for more exceptional players who want a fun, relatively mature, and serious raiding environment. Go check out their recruitment information if that sounds like something interesting!

They are looking for 1-2 Mages, a Holy/Ret Pally, a DPS DK, and maybe a warlock.

Introducing Kamigami Tools

http://www.stratfu.com/kamigami/

Do you like looking at the top DPS rankings on World of Logs to figure out how you're doing? Are you a raid leader that wants to know the realistic maximum DPS/HPS for a class on any given fight? Not sure which spec you should be playing to eke out the most numbers? Wonder no more! The Kamigami WoW Tools are here to answer your questions!

This initial release focuses on comparing all the classes and specs on each individual Icecrown boss (currently 25 man normal mode). It scours the World of Logs top rankings pages every day to provide a comparitive view of what the best players are capable of under ideal circumstances.

Some of the details:

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Some people are saying it's too early to call icecrown a failure as far as difficulty scaling goes, arguing that the limited-attempt bosses will be the hard ones.

Paragon just took down BQL (5 hours), however. They're a strong guild no doubt, but even assuming it takes the top 100 guilds twice as long, we're still talking a couple weeks tops so far.

Here are their comments via a Something Awful thread about their pre-BQL work:

8/12 bosses down in a bit over 8 hours or so, quite easy to be honest

Marrowgar one shot.
Deathwhisper was actually a bit hard, took 1.5 hours.
Gunship one shot.
Saurfang 2.5 hours (less than 5% wipe on the second pull though).
Valithria 1 hour.
Festergut third pull.
Rotface one shot.
Blood Council second pull.

The rockets fired from the other ship knockback you like 4 yards in hard mode. Very challenging But yeah, the hard mode is pretty much as easy as the normal mode. I think 1 more add on your own ship.

So -- too easy? Or too early to tell?

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http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=22748763261&sid=1

• Titan-Forged Spaulders of Triumph are purchasable by druids as intended.
• Lovely Charms now stack to 40.
• Any player who has a Lovely Charm Collector's Kit in their bags now has a chance to receive a Lovely Charm when in a group or raid and a group member gets a killing blow as long as they are within a certain range of the kill.
• In all difficulties of the Lich King encounter, players who are tanking raging spirits are no longer valid Harvest Soul targets during phase 3, Vile Spirits in phase 3 now spawn at a greater height, and Vile Spirits in phase 3 will not be spawned as often.
• In the 10 player Lich King encounter, Raging Spirits have had their health decreased in both normal and heroic versions and then fewer Vile Spirirts will be summoned in just the 10 player normal mode.
• Svala Sorrowgrave in Utgarde Pinnacle should no longer get stuck in the air during her transformation phase.
• The Blue Sack of Gems earned from completing a random heroic Occulus dungeon is no longer tradeable.
• The Tier 10 tanking plate gloves and chest pieces now have their appropriate durability on them.

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I am not personally motivated by competition, although I realize many (most?) people are. This fact means I can be very surprised by the lengths people will go to for "keeping up with the Joneses."

Earlier this week Ensidia exploited their kill, and got a ban and the achievement removed (although their alts got it down, so they were able to do hardmodes this week.)

Yesterday I posted about Tasty Beverage, who server transferred but also faction transferred in order to get extra attempts.

Today we have a guild who was unable to kill Lich King on mains or alts given the limited attempts. They solved their problem, however, by having someone transfer in who can unlock hardmode for them and are now doing hardmodes without actually having killed Lich King:

http://www.wowprogress.com/guild/us/sen-jin/Premonition

This was stated in a large IRC channel. I've removed the name of the person speaking since I don't have an easy way of reaching him (he's offline):

(nameremoved) Mage in our guild got accepted
(nameremoved) Was decent at WoW
(nameremoved) Then Premo took him after they had declined him months ago
(nameremoved) To unlock hardmodes for them

And from the guildleader of the guild the person left:

Empyrea, who provided them hard mode access, was from our guild. He was promoted to full member just a few days ago.

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