Schlagwort: blizzard

It took long enough to get the Wyrm down, but fully focussed Sapphiron went down first try of the day. Good job guys! Now let us kill Kel Thuzad and get the rest of the evening off.

Blizzard ’s interactive Outland Map has a nice gimmick. Open the Map and click the regions in the following order:

1. Shadowmoon Valley
2. Blade’s Edge Mountains
3. Nagrand
4. Netherstorm
5. Zangarmarsh
6. Hellfire Peninsula
7. Terokkar Forest

It will take a moment, but check the Bloodelf in the top left corner.

Well the hardware upgrade for Ravencrest has been installed and thanks Blizzard, there is no more lag. Or wait, the instant disconnects prevent us from even being able to experience lag. To be honest we hoped for a better solution 😉

Edit: at 21:45 the Server was back up. I just wonder why Blizzard will not offer us a move to a less crowded server. But well since they actually can earn cash with payed char transfer this will probbaly not be seen again.

It has just been a few minutes, that Borked guild on Ravencrest killed the 4 Horsemen. Sincere gratz for this awesome achievement. The recent latency issues and disconnects were a strong obstacle, but nevertheless Borked got them down! Awesome job guys!

I am so tired of this discussion, but about 3-4 Players a day ask me why I prefer using maces over swords or daggers. Its not easy to explain because its more a gut instinct than anything else. Well there are daggers with very high burst damage, while striking from behind. There are fist weapons with 5% increased chance to land critical hits and swords with 5% chance of an additional attack per swing. Those builts are all about maximizing damageoutput. Maces only have the chance to stun the Opponent for 3 seconds, which does not increase damage at all. What makes that even worse is that most mobs in high end instances and especially bosses are immune to this stun.

This means that a guild basically has no benefit, from taking a mace rogue over a sword rogue. Quite the contrary the total raid DPS decreases when they invite you to the raid. But that is not even nearly all. Blizzard decided to make the gap between mace and sword rogues even bigger. The highend swords always have a higher maximum damage and much better stats compared to maces. Before the introduction of Ahn'Qiraij there were merely 2 epic maces worth getting. Just recently they introduced more epic maces. Let us the current high end weapons: high end swords:

Edited with the updated Weapons: 

• Gressil, Dawn of Ruin Lvl 60; 138-257 Damage; Speed 2.70; 73,1 DPS; 15 Stamina; 40 Attack Power
• The Hungering Cold Lvl 60, 140 Armor; 76 – 143 Damage;1.50 Speed, 73.0 DPS

• Misplaced Servo Arm Lvl 60; 128 – 238 Damage; Speed 2.80; 65.4 DPS, Equip: Chance to discharge electricity causing 100 to 150 Nature damage to your target.
• The Castigator Lvl 60, 119 – 221 Damage; Speed 2.60; 65.4 DPS, +9 Sta; +1% crit; +1% hit; +16 AP; Equip: Improves your chance to get a critical strike by 1%.

Gressil compared to the Misplaced Servo Arm does not simply have more dps, it also has significant higher max damage, some attack power and stamina, which makes the weapons by far superior. The Hungering Cold is more a Warrior Offhand but very fast. While the Speed of the Castigator is really too slow to make it a good offhand and too fast to even make it a good rogue mainhand.

By reading this You could question why to go mace at all. Gone fishing to Feralas one day, being a happy Dagger Rogue, I noticed some Horde players invade the Stronghold. Being a mean Person in general I decided to harass them a little bit. I remember quite well, my first sight of a Mace Rogue and laughed at this easy prey. "Mace and Rogue … haha how silly can one be."

I remember saying in Guild Chatsomething someting like: "/g haha, in Feathermoon is a rogue using maces – such a noob, maces what a Roooooogguuuueeeeee – haha". About 20 seconds later Elgor replied "Caution Slant, those mace rogues are dangerous", but I was already dead and was puzzled: "WTF????".

It took several weeks until I overcame my refusal to even trying maces. But then I decided to make my own picture about using maces and got myself a Mass of Mc Gowan and a Cruel Hand of Timmy as offhand.

What I found was totally different from what I expected. Since my guild rerolled on a German Server I was more or less dependant on myself and decided to get gear via PvP. If maces do 1 thing, they rock in PvP especially versus leather, mail, plate. Just when going for cloth I was missing the daggers burst damage. The extra stun from maces came always in so handy.

It was a good way to stop players from running away and still have combopoints to finish them off. With improved Kidney shot (it lowered the coodown back then) the stuns were especially annoying for casters and warriors who were basically unable to fight back. I compensated the lack of burst damage with cold blood and adapted my playstyle around the weaknesses of a mace rogue.

I enjoy maces because they helped me win critical fights versus other players, even though I had just blue gear versus their tier II epic gear. Maybe that is my source of mace love. If I was able to get to position 6 on Ravencrest PvP Rankings with blue gear, how good can it become with epix?

Other People say that using maces is not roguelike, that it is not stealthy. But there are a lot of scenes from movies and games where a rogue goes to the back of a person and knocks it out with a blunt weapon. Garret in the Thief Pc Game series for example. If he is not stealthy, who is?

It is currently very tempting to go swords, because they are so much better damagewise. But I have adopted my playstyle all around maces and have at least 140 days played time using maces, which makes it quite hard to change back. Apart from that I like being unique, there are not many mace rogues. When You ask other Rogues about their builds then it is some popular build, that some play even though they suck at playing it and even though they do not enjoy it. They just play it because it is THE build for maximized damage.

I just love to play maces and that is the only thing that really matters, it is what makes me enjoy putting all effort in a good performance. I see my rogue more as a pitfighter, since he is so awesome to play in Zerg situations. Currently I am working on getting the Misplaced Servor Arm and the Castigator. Its just bad, when I have to realize that swords and daggers are passed to rogues, while maces are not. Soetimes this makes me dissappointed and angry, especially since rogues passed items to warriors in Naxxramas. Its just a little upgrade to most, while it would be a huge upgrade for me. In the other hand I calm down fast. After all I am in Borked, which means that eventually I will get all items I could ever want. Until then I will just own poor Hordes with my Sandpolished Hammer and Ebon Hand. (edit: got Misplaced Servo Arm and Castigator now and it owns)

Blizzard finally brought some platforms up and we are testing the new content.

The first UBRS run yielded neither druid nor rogue book for us and the previously instant join battlegrounds for Alliance on Ravencrest are at the moment 45 minutes and counting up. So much for first patch 1.12 experiences.

Apparently there are difficulties after applying the patch 1.12 to the Realms. For now I can ony see one platform online and there is no eta for the rest of the Realms. The poor Realms that are up have already queues of 1500+ players.

Due to two separate issues the maintenance will be extended beyond the original ETA of 16:00 CEST. Please refer to the Breaking News on the game login screen for the latest news.“ – GameMaster

I suppose some poor technicians work like madmen at the moment 🙂 You can take your time and read the Patch Notes carefully. Rogues may want to try the talent calculator but of course the Worls of Warcraft Website is down as well

„The server at www.wow-europe.com is taking too long to respond.“

Hopefully the issues will be resolved soon.

Exisitngs Guilds will suffer from a dramatic changes to high end raiding in the upcoming expansion Burning Crusade. The new instances will be most likely limited to 10 and 25 players only.

„In Burning Crusade, end game raiding (which occupies WoW’s max level players) will be done in groups of 25 or 10. Illidan’s Black Temple, the most challenging raid instance that will appear in Burning Crusade (at release), has a 25-player limit.“ – 1up.com

„I always thought that larger parties enforce more specific roles for the individual. People spam bolts to maximize dps, not because it’s necessarily fun.
The roles have been specific in large groups and now we are just making individual contribution more significant. The fact that you don’t have backup healers stacked 3 or 4 high means your hybrid classes will feel more pressure in various situations. Each player’s efforts are more distinct in a smaller group.
Bottom line, smaller groups make for a more functional game. Everyone gains more opportunity for participation.
And when people get to choose stats through socketed itemization, that aims towards hybrid classes making armor for their play style.
So, to answer the question directly, 5/10/25 player caps helps hybrid functionality and utility a lot. ;)“ – Tseric (Blizzard)

In my eyes this change is not good at all. Existing Guilds will have more arguments and whining on who is going to be able to join the raids. They will be forced to split well working teams in primary and secondary groups (do you want to be in a secondary group?) or to drop members. For this reason I do not really see how I will even be allowed to join for the new instances to „contribute“ with my poor equipped alt Druid while 15 members are envious looking at my spot in a raid. I suppose I will be stuck to play my Rogue forever if I ever want to see this content. Its bad when developpers never play their own high end content in an existing guild and plan these things without realizing what effect this will cause on people.
It has become impossible to join a group to the non raid instances if you are a feral druid already with the limits introduced a while back. Also Rogues and Hunters have a hard time finding groups. I fear that these changes will begin to show same effect on raid instances.
I wonder about the real thought behind of all this. Is the size of a raid reason of the massive lagspikes we recently encountered on our Realms? Too many people at the same time in the same intances for the existing server hardware? Are there too many ct-raidassist messages flooding the servers when playing in large groups? Does Blizzard think with this limit there will eventually be less players or players will be spread around more?

Anyway there is nothing that can be done about this anyhow, but all these coming changes make me feel uneasy about the future of World of Warcraft and I am enjoying to play my Lineage II Spellhowler more and more.

On my research about „Warden“ (Blizzards anticheating tool, that monitors a players system for suspicious processes) I stumbled over the „Governor„, a monitor tool that shows which action is performed by warden. I know this is old news for some, but the awareness of the base of players is not very high about this. Considering the amount of 59.000 banned accounts this june I figured it was worth some mention,

„This software is known as the ‚warden client‘ – it’s written like shellcode in that it’s position independant. It is downloaded on the fly from Blizzard’s servers, and it runs about every 15 seconds. It is one of the most interesting pieces of spyware to date, because it is designed only to verify compliance with a EULA/TOS. Here is what it does, about every 15 seconds, to about 4.5 million people (500,000 of which are logged on at any given time)“

Hoglund, author of the Governor, says he watched the warden „sniff down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar“

Further Information can be foun in this article on P2P.net and on the Homepage of the Governor.

Due to technical issues the maintenance for the realms listed below will be delayed. We do not, at this time, have an ETA on when these realms will be up. We apologise for the inconvenience we know this is causing.

Ahn’Qiraj
Bronzebeard
Chromaggus
Dentarg
Drak’thul
Emeriss
Executus
Hakkar
Khadgar
Kor’gall
Kul Tiras
Mazrigos
Moonglade
Scarshield Legion
Steamwheedle Cartel
Talnivarr
Trollbane
Xavius

Read the Posting here.