Where have I been:

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Black+Dragonflight&n=Boredum

Finally got 80 last night. Been grinding it out pretty hard. That plus raiding 3 ulduars a week left me with very little time. An issue which just got a lot less time consuming because of my other big accomplishment. My guild finally downed firefighter in 25 man. Hopefully I will be able to get out more regular updates now that these two major time constraints have finally been completed. EDIT: Sooooo, the alts strike again. Last patch our alt group (with the help of a voidwalker) completed the 10 man meta before most other guilds got them on mains.

Alt mounts V2: Darkneskilla successfully tanks firefighter 10 (after giving all my healers heart attacks I love you all for putting up with me I still owe some of you steak dinners at some point for something but I forgot what). Thanks to Korsten, jeff, and jordan for coming on their mains ONLY TO GET CARRIED BY ALTS O.o. Also thanks to dab for knowing how do bind FoK to every key on his keyboard and facerolling.

Blizzard at its absolute lowest

Hello, my concern is about "exploiting" in Flame Leviathan and Heroic Flame Leviathan of Ulduar.

Few days ago (tuesday 16th of June) our small casual friend based guilds raid group for FL got banned for "Intented Exploiting" (a term used by Blizzard employee for our activity).
Since our guild does not consist 10 active members our only pve raid target have been Flame Leviathan.
If you know the fight of Flame Leviathan I want to know your opinion and your explonation if you think the following is exploiting.

---

Tactic posted on MMO-champion website june 14, 2009, 10:44:07 AM. Link: http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=64594.0
The tactic pictured by my (bad) paint-skills: http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/3274/srslywtf.jpg

Vehicles that was used on fight:
2 demolishers with 2 drivers and 2 anti-air personnel.
1 bike (extra player)

Since vehicles scale with item level, our guild has pretty nice requirements for this - we do lots of pvp, pvp items got high item levels too.

Step to step tactic:
1. Fight begins by kiting Flame Leviathan to one corner, either which demolisher got the aggro first
2. Anti-air personnels begins to shoot flying pyrite boxes from air and gather then during ALL time
3. Leviathan is kited by the path shown in screenshot
3.1 I'm pretty sure everyone here is familiar with The Pythagorean theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2) and everone can say c>a and c>b. There is the logic behind this kiting path.
4. Demolishers are constantly spamming pyrite barrel (number 2 keybind) which can be done by good pyrite gathering of anti-air personnels
5. When aggro chances demolisher begins to "packpedall" the tank back to his corner. The other demolisher that doesn't have aggro will follow Flame Leviathan in order to pick up more pyrite that have been dropped.

---

The kill lead to 72hour ban on most of us, but a good friend of mine got permanently banned.
I feel really bad for my friend who got banned, I can assure you than none of us knew that it was exploiting.
Nevertheless all of us got banned becouse of "Intented Exploiting" without any warning.

I really don't see the justice in this. I've done this in full 25man raid before in my old guild and we did it pretty much the same - except playing it really - really stupidly compared to this tactic.

---

After speaking to a gm he also said that Flame Leviathan is 10/25 man boss and when it's done by lesser players its considered as exploiting. Seriously there's even achievement to clear ulduar less than full raid!

Here's the conversation link with a GM. His name is sencored, I think name&shame rights goes for gms too.
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/1132/conversationwithagm.jpg

And yes, we've sent a complain about this to the webform gave in email. No reply so far and propably keeps us waiting for another week or something.

"That is not really kiting Crescendoll, making him run between point A and B and never getting near a player was seen as exploiting here." -GM
What the **** are we suppose to do, ram into FL and let our vehicles get destroyed?
Before we got FL down, it actually got really really close (I think it hit my friends demo once or twice).

---

So our guild cannot do 10m or 25m version of Flame Leviathan without having a full raid?
And what was the exploiting, kiting?

Regards, Offensive/Deviant/Crescendoll of Trollbane
Sorry for my grammar, eng is my 3rd language.



EDIT:
We did not attack the turrets above FL and we did not interrupt Flame Vents in any way. Both of our demolisher handlers (me other, you can check gear itemlvl) had over 1million hp (something like 1060k).

[ Post edited by Offensive ]

source

Although it will likely be taken down soon by blizzard

He feeds on your Tears

After 1shoting him on our first kill, with a death, and not having our regular group for our second kill last week, this week on our 3rd kill we successfully earned "HE FEEDS ON YOUR TEARS" by killing Algalon with 0 deaths for the entire lockout.

Maybe it was a good thing fraps fucked up last week as I now how the he feeds on your tears kill frapsed.

I would also like to congratulate our guild for completing our first legendary mace, GRTZ JOY (we actually got it last week I'm kinda slow).

Failboat

I was going to put up a fraps of our 10algalon today.

Only when we killed him last night I started my fraps as normal and when the fight was over I checked and it did not record.

My fraps is numpad 5. TO BAD IT ONLY FREAKIN ACTUALLY STARTS FRAPS IF NUMLOCK IS ON FFS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Opening comments to as much trolling about my stupidity as you like.

Edit: Finally got around to updating my feral druid guide over on tankspot. Wowhead is being slow as it normally is on Tuesdays so the talents are not 100% up-to-date as of this edit but I am working on it now.

A favor for Toskk

Many of you know toskk for his amazing work in the feral DPS community. Recently he became one of the admins over at the druidwiki. Even more recently than that he has begun to take an interest in the theory behind game design. He started a new page over on druidwiki about it at http://druid.wikispaces.com/game_design.

As part of this project he is conducting a survey http://druid.wikispaces.com/message/view/ToskksDPSGearMethod/12498927

Well, it's totally off-topic for this forum, but I thought I'd describe my latest WoW project here, with the hopes that a few Druids would be willing to give the survey a test-run and provide some feedback on it. :)

As some here probably know, I'm actually even more interested in game design than I am feral druid mechanics. In particular, I'm interested in pushing the boundaries of video games by applying Educational Psychology and theories about how learning happens to 'entertainment' video game design.

I'm hoping to launch a new page/blog/discussion board (probably here on the Druid Wiki for lack of a better place to host it) all about game design and WoW in the next few weeks, and the first project for that is a survey designed to look at just how effective of a learning environment World of Warcraft (and hopefully eventually other mmo's) is.

I'd love to be able to eventually collect several thousand responses to the survey, to give a really good set of data on the strengths and weaknesses of the learning environment present in WoW. I'll be posting it in more visible locations soon, but in the meantime I'd appreciate it if any of the Druids here would give it a try. :) The survey can be found on surveymonkey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ZEGZG0aVq8lK_2fqKGtF7hPg_3d_3d

Thanks again to all those who have supported this wiki and the feral project.. and just to stem any fears, that's not over. ;) I've got a new version of the model cooking already ;)

Toskk

Please take a look at it and help him out.

Ulduar: The Lifestyle

[20:09:46] [G] [80:Baddylol]: damn still in ulduar?
[20:10:00] [G] [80:Lazzek:2]: we live in here

On that note: After a DC last week that cost us about 10 minutes out of our hour (what would have been US tied for 3rd), we went back in and 1shot Algalon. 18th 10 man kill in the world 7th in the US . The only hard part of that fight is the 1 hour limit. Even before the video was released by underground cosmonauts (or whatever their name is) we had the fight completely out. Even though last week was a tremendous disapointment 1shoting it this week more than made up for it.

Currently working on 0 watcher yogg. (Man this fight is a son of a bitch)

Ok, not that I have time to write something up properly:

And must say I am slightly disappointed.

This was our 3rd hour on him. Our first week we went in knowing absolutely nothing. In the first 20 minutes of that hour we thought we had figured out a few things.

2 days later the 1st 10 man algalon kill video was released. At that time me and my raid all commented that we were extremely disappointed in it. Those few things we thought we figured out, well it turns out that was the entire fight.

It is one of the most straightforward and easy fights in the entire zone. The only limiting factor is that your entire raid is terrified of being "THAT GUY" who dcs once you start and wastes your hour.

Anyway second hour we wiped sub 25% once then had a DC and never got back to phase 2 because of tank deaths.

This 6 minutes we went in and 1shot it.

For as much as blizzard hyped this encounter, I feel cheated. The most difficult part of the fight is that he hits the tank ala brutallus and if either of the main tank healers has to move from cosmic smash the tank pretty much falls over.

And the comment of the year award goes to.....

Lissanna (Author of http://restokin.com/):

They look like they walked out of a Hello Kitty store and got hit by a Care Bear Stare on their way to My Little Pony land

and a close second:

After seeing the NE color schemes for cat, I think I’d rather be dead broccoli tree that bright pink cotton candy tree.

WOW............. HOW FUCKING HORRIBLE ARE YOU BLIZZARD

Sorry, but FUCKING CHRIST.

Can you possibly have a worse model for cat form. Not every night elf druid is a female IRL.

Night elf cats might as well be fucking barbie dolls.

Great so horde cats look evil, and alliance get stuck with fluffy pink kittys from hello kitty island adventure. next can we plz get a bear form that turns into ivan the circus bear?

so they took in the teeth a little and changed the colors of em pretty much and everyone thinks this is great concept art? lmao aint no wonder u guys are stuck in this game youre so easily pleased.

Dont understand what everyone is so excited about with NE cats...3 of them look virtually the same and 2 of them look gender confused.

Highly disappointed, taurens look so much cooler.

meh i could do without the bracelets and necklace.

They look a bit to feminine to me.

Tauren definately appear to have more work done to them. Tauren look fierce and awesome while with the Night-Elf cat forms look like they would faint if they had a splinter under a nail

In my post before i was going to mention this...

They might as well put braids in their hair, a ribbon on their tail and give em make-up.

I personally like the new tauren cat forms better, they look more lion-ish now.

The new night elf ones are [i]cute[/i] as currently presented...I like them, but they look a bit My Little Pony-ish to me, and I suspect some people may not be thrilled with "cute." But at least the colors are changeable via the barber shop so no one is locked into pink & purple pastels.

/Agree 100%, Make them look more badass plz!!! How im i suppose to murder my target looking like i came from Hello Kitty Island Adventure

IMO, NE bear form is good, though what's with the fruity necklace? An acorn?

NE cat form I don't care for, IMO looks cheap compared to the Tauren one, plus I was looking to pick the black cat, and the black one has pink eyes amd a glowey pink necklace? WTF Blizz? I think the Black cat should match the black bear with silver eyes and silver accents (necklace).

Glowey pink necklace... are you kidding me Blizz?!

wow, they REALLY need to make new models separating male/female. Just glad my druid toon is a chick, so I won't get the pain of castration whenever I go cat.

They're so... girly. The far left and right ones are the only ones that don't look as much like a girl's accessory pet. Would it be possible at all to spread around the coloration between the tuaren and ne models? The cows get all the earthy tones and ne's are stuck with a crapton of pastels.

Uhhh...am i missing something here, 5 out of the 6 NE cats are grayish, blackish, purplish or some combination thereof. Not a lot of variation there. Looks like they came off Tween Island with the pink and collars. Guess a lot of people are easily impressed with mediocrity.

I was skeptical, and I have some issues with the other new forms, but I'm actually pretty happy with these. Well done.

I'd prefer they didn't have the bracelets, necklace, and face markings. But they're at least somewhat minimalist, so I'm happy.

(Now if we can just fix the elf bears being bald with sideburns...)

Just give me a "Don't change to the new models" switch and I'll be happy.

It's probably because no matter how you project yourself it's hard to not look feminine in pastels.

Maybe its the bracelets and big dangly necklace. And the appearance of eyeliner from how the eyes glow.

I still fail to understand why you refuse to let us select our colors independently of hair choice when it would enable so many more people to be satisfied with the new forms. Especially when multiple forms may be suited to one hair color/fur color (spotted cow -> black cat or white cat, 4 different purple cats for a purple haired/skinned elf, etc).

Blue responds to the one post out of a hundred praising the new art; ducks the other 99 hating it.

"Since when did male Belfs take over our druid cat form?"

/sigh

We took a look at The Leviathan's Coil and are happy with its stats.

It is a very nice ring. :)

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16473758064&postId=175618460570&sid=1#85


edit: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17367604106&pageNo=5&sid=1#87

On the topic of Leviathan's Coil, we were originally happy with the armor value. However, when we looked at it further, we realized the entire ring was over-budget. Technically, we had spent itemization budget on armor and then split the stats again as if we had not. We decided not to keep the high armor because we didn't want to set the expectation that there would be high armor rings every tier and we didn't want players feeling like they had to go back to old content to get the only high armor ring.

So now, it is budgeted at 219 instead of 226 GOOD FUCKING JOB BLIZZARD. can you ever get it right?

Forgotten Heroes Recruiting

Sorry readers but something went wrong with the video I had planned on posting today.

In the mean time, my guild Forgotten Heroes of Black Dragonflight is still recruiting for Ulduar hard modes. ATM we are one hard mode away from 25 man algalon with our kill of 3 elder freya last night (a kill which moved us up to 35th in the world and 16th in the US once guild ox updates). Of the hard modes not required for algalon we have all of those on farm as well except for 1 watcher yogg.

1. About us:

Forgotten Heroes has been a raiding guild since the release of World of Warcraft and we currently reside on Black Dragonflight PvP. Our end game goal is PvE oriented and we are always pushing to better ourselves. Most of the guild enjoys PvP as well and we have many top arena teams within the battlegroup. If this sounds like something you would be interested in, please head to our website http://www.fhguild.net/ and apply.

2. Our schedule:

We currently raid Monday - Friday @ 7:00 PM EST generally with weekends off although sometimes we do push Sundays for progression. When content is on farm we usually spend 2 nights a week raiding. The guild bank covers all progression related repair bills so don't worry about spending countless amounts of gold wiping to encounters.

3. What we expect:

• - We expect raiders to attend at least 4 days a week.
• - We expect raiders to have proper consumables, specs, enchants and gems giving you the biggest advantage within a raid. To this extent certain fights require specific specs/gear/consumables to be able to survive the random burst (3 elder freya) or not run out of mana (hard general vezax) to name some. You will be asked to respec and know how to play that spec, what rotations to use, etc.
  
• - We expect you to have a working microphone and able to speak.
• - Most importantly we want someone who enjoys the environment and enjoys interacting with the guild you play with. Obviously if you're obnoxious and never shut up thats a problem, but being comfortable speaking on a regular basis is the goal.

Still Recruiting: 1 Resto Shaman, 1 Warlock (Exceptional players of other classes may be considered)

http://www.fhguild.net