Project Lore

When you show up for an instance, or even more important a raid, are you prepared? Do you come with mana pots and healing pots? Do you have your food? Did you repair? Well you should have. And that's what I mean - be prepared. If you're going to raid, have your stuff ready. And when you go to a place you don't know, know what your job is and know what skills will come in handy when unexpected stuff shows up. Who hasn't been in a pug or even a guild raid and someone in chat says, 'oops I forgot my... can you summon me back?' geezz ppl. Come to play! When mobs attack, you know what to do, learn what to do, or at least learn what your class is supposed to do: CC, DPS, Heal, Tank, whatever. If you are prepared in knowing what you can do and should do, you will probably live longer in that encounter. Now in RL, it's hard to be prepared all the time, just like those pats that whack you in BT or worse the ninjas in Heroic Shattered Halls. You can be prepared mentally tho. Know that life is random and that stuff pops up and ultimately it's how you react to it that makes the difference. Be prepared as best you can be, for a raid in WoW or for a job interview in RL. Know what you're good at and be willing to get better at it. And most important of all, if you are prepared and know that whatever happens, it will be okay, then you truly are prepared. So... are you prepared?

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Some more details have been coming out about the pre-Wrath of the Lich King content patch. As you know, the upcoming patch will act as a “bridging” patch. What this means is that Blizzard will use patch 3.0.2 to introduce a chunk of the Wrath changes, before Wrath is launched. This is the same thing Blizzard did with patch 2.0.1, introducing some aspects of The Burning Crusade into vanilla World of Warcraft. That addition came just a little over a month before TBC's release. Eyonix mentioned as part of patch 3.0.2's announcement that the notes would be coming shortly. However they still have not been posted. Nevertheless, Blizzard has posted additional information through alternative means. First we have a promise from Bornakk that the game won't be broken by the patch. I still remember the horror of “Assault on Blackwing Lair” or patch 1.6.0. I never wanted to use add-ons again after how long it took for all of my add-ons to be repaired, and then the time it took to go find them.  One by one.  Thankfully, we have tools like BLASC now. Bornakk also mentions that the patch should arrive “in the coming weeks”. To back up that statement the PTR forums have been wiped. An act that always happens shortly before a new patch is tested. Zarhym brought us the first list of detailed changes yesterday, the long promised changes to raid buffs/debuffs and stacking. The changes are drastic and the post is long, so it is worth the read for the hardcore PvE players out there. The Summation:

• Most buffs/debuffs will be raid-wide (ie Warrior shouts, Shaman totems).
• All buffs are categorized in one or more of 30 categories. Most categories have only a few buffs in them.
• Buffs from the same categories will not stack, with the most powerful buff taking precedence
• Mana regeneration buffs to be assigned to 10 players with the least mana
• Numerous existing buffs and debuffs have been reworked for the new system

Blizzard hopes that the changes will allow raiders to bring whomever is available to a raid – within reason - instead of requiring a concrete template be filled. Zarhym noted that Blizzard will be fine tuning the system and changes as needed based on internal testing and community feedback. So start the feedback process.

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This is the first of many features about addons I use in order to make Juggy the best shaman ever and Xenophontos a halfway decent warlock. Grid is an addon I used much more while I was resto and main healing, but it is still pretty useful even while I'm enhancement. An Ace addon, grid displays party and raid health bars in a compact form, and it gives loads of information using very little screen real estate. This means that at a glance, you can see how your raid is doing. By default, it displays each party member as a small square within a grid. I think that is where the name came from, but can we ever be sure? One of the great included features of grid are the inverted health bars, meaning it fills up a dim box with color as the player loses health, making it easier to spot who needs healing in a large raid. There is also a built in range check that can automatically dim all player's boxes who are out of range. This feature is invaluable, since trying to heal players who are out of range can waste a lot of time. It's also a great feature for battlegrounds, allowing you to become top healer and help your side win. Lastly, my favorite feature of Grid is its use of the incoming heal module, which shows a visual estimate of any incoming heals on any target in the raid from anyone using Grid (or any other ace addon that has the incoming heal feature). If all of the healers use this addon, you can avoid a lot of overhealing. There are also border colors, center icon, and other corner icons that are configurable to show tons of different statuses of each player in the raid. I do like to make a couple of tweaks to the defaults, though. I play on a relatively high resolution, and I find the default size of the squares too small. So, I scale it up in the options. As a shaman, I have two dispel options, poison and disease. The standard set up has all types of debuffs appear as a single mark in one corner of the player's box. I go in and change it so that magic debuffs and curses don't show up and poisons are in one corner while diseases are in another. That way I know which button to press or totem to drop in order to cure all of my party members. I also like to be able to see when Dorkins is going to run out of mana, so I've picked up GridManaBars. This takes a slice of the square and turns it into a mana bar. Imagine that! Most of the other options are fine for me on their default settings, but Grid is highly flexible, so play around and look at the documentation to find the settings that work best for you.

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Well it finally happened. After a few uneventful trips into Karazhan I got the drop day. We actually had a ton of world drop Epics including my new, yes I know they're for druids, feet Zierhut's Lost Treads. Also I was able to land Malchazeen for my PvP dagger spec... very nice! Oh and Maiden dropped these little bad boys, Bracers of Maliciousness. So it was a good day :) Oh yeah and this off of Chess... Mithril Chain of Heroism... too many Epics in one run? No on your life!!! - Dr Dark

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So here's the question, is it still worth RAIDing if you don't get any loot? I think it is but man does it suck! With all the time it takes to get a group together. Not enough healers, too many healers, no off tank, too many tanks. We don't have the group make up for ZA let's do Kara.

So the stage was set for a nice Kara run. There are a few good drops in there I haven't got yet so I'm really excited. We easily down Huntsman, Morose, Maiden, Curator and Shade... then we get trapped in Shades room! Really, door won't open? Crap! Then our lock DC'd!!! And our group fell like a deck of cards. I just want Spiteblade!!!

Was fun though, so what do you think?

DrDark

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Well how's about that. I started a guild about a year ago and we've been rocking it! We leveled like mad and got tons of 70's pretty quick. Seeing as we were so uber we started farming Kara. Then we moved onto ZA. At about the time we started really owning Kara I started working on this site and took a break from WoW while I did it. My first day back I'm swept up into a Gruul's Lair group and we two shot him for the first time in the guild! Oh the joy!!! So when I got back on and really wanted to start RAIDing with my guild I signed up for ZA on the guild calendar... "Oh there's no way you can go with them." "What? Why?" "Oh that's the group that runs through ZA easy they can't have you with them." Why is ZA so different from Kara? Is it soooo much harder? I know it's the next step up but really? I'm going to cause the group to fail? Me a good DPS rogue who knows how not to be killed. Anyway, rant = over.

Dr Dark

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As we all know, Season 4 is almost upon us. What does that mean for me? It means Season 2 equipment will be available for Honor. Ideally, I would be grinding out Honor and tokens with the rest of the noobs who don't have Merciless or Vengeful gear yet. I'd love to buy a whole set of Epics, since both my Enhancment and Restoration sets have ugly blue holes in them. Unfortunately, I decided long ago that battlegrounds alone are much worse than battlegrounds with friends. Now, for me, this is pretty much the case with anything in WoW. But most of my time is spent dealing with guild organization (I had no idea what I was getting myself into), raids (same), or financing my habits, both in game and IRL. This leaves precious little time for battlegrounds and even less when friends are available. Alas, Season 2 gear, it seems we are not meant to be. I guess I will have to try and make those ZA runs in the future.

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