News, Patches, PTR, Ulduar

It’s coming fast and furious now. Methinks we’ll see the PTR far sooner than I imagined. Here’s the cliff notes for pertinent information:

• Boss testing will only be allowed during primetime in respective regions.
• Boss testing schedule will be published beforehand so you will know when and what is being tested.
• Some bosses will only be tested in ONE region (US or EU).
• Only a couple bosses will be up for extended testing.
• First set of bosses to be tested are: Freya, Thorim, Hodir, The Iron Council (killing all the good guys eh?).
• Vehicles will mostly only be used in the initial encounter area. Once you’re inside the “meat” of the dungeon there won’t be vehicles (or very few).
• The power of vehicles will scale with your gear (most likely iLevel and quality, not actual stats).

So far the known bosses in Ulduar are as follows:

• Freya
• Thorim
• Hodir

• Tyr
• Mimir

• The Iron Council
• The Flame Leviathan
• Yogg-Saron

I will update this post when and if new information becomes available. Tell your friends to visit if you want Ulduar information distilled down to a need-to-know format!

News, Patches, PTR, Ulduar

Blizzard has released its official Ulduar preview, available here. I’ve distilled down the important points for raiding as well as a reflection on my previous information leak:

• The number of encounters as well as the information about an entry “wing” from my leak source proved almost correct. That means the rest of is most likely close to correct. Check out my original post Preliminary Ulduar Info Leak for the details. Summary: one “arena” style encounter where you fight four bosses at once, a final wing similar to the Frostwyrm lair that won’t be seen on the PTR, one hard-mode-only encounter.
• Ulduar is a prison for an Old God. What this means is that the final area (similar to Frostwyrm lair) will most likely be the actual prison itself, while the rest of it will basically be fighting through the defenses or wardens of the prison (”Iron Army”).
• It’s hard to tell from the wording, but it seems like the initial area will be a large open area in which you will pilot vehicles and have to clear our a lot of trash (Iron Army stuff) to get bosses to spawn. This may be vaguely like Hyjal in that you’re in one fixed area (although probably much bigger with a lot more movement) and the trash and bosses come to you.
• The fact that the initial area is so vehicle dependent means your gear will have very little impact on your ability to progress through it. This is a plus for those guilds who haven’t had as much time to farm up the gear.
• As I suspected, they are heavily leaning on “hard mode” versions of encounters similar to Sartharion to satisfy both the needs of accessibility (easy content for the masses) and challenge (difficult content for power guilds to measure themselves by). From the wording it seems like they have whole-heartedly embraced this as the new paradigm by which all raid content will be designed, and I think this is a huge boon to raiding in WoW.
• They’ve not only embraced “hard mode” content but also more granularity in individual encounters. I suspect that most encounters will either be “easy” or “hard” mode but at least one and probably a few will provide multiple levels of challenge similar to how Sartharion had four difficulty levels (0 drakes, 1, 2, 3).
• “Patch 3.1 will hit the Public Test Realms very soon”. When Blizzard says “very soon” that usually means within 2-3 weeks. If you’ve gotten lax with your raid schedule and you wish to be competitive when 3.1 hits I recommend you begin ramping back up in anticipation of the PTR. Get a post out on your guild forums telling people that they need to be ready to get characters copied to the test realms as soon as the copies come up. Preparation is the key here because if you’re slow out of the gate, getting copied to the PTR can take a very long time.

Get your horses ready! The gates will open soon.

armory, News

Update: It appears that it was either a temporary problem or they merely changed the timeout. Upon further investigation it appears that the armory will throttle requests that come faster than about one per 1.4 seconds over a long period of tie (about 10 minutes). If you are doing continuous requests you can safely do them at one per 1.5 seconds without tripping the throttle. You can also send 45 requests in a very short period of time (a few seconds) before getting throttled. At this point you need to take a break for a few minutes. You just need to make sure it averages out to one per 1.5 seconds over the long term or else you will be throttled. If you start receiving 503 errors and you keep sending requests you will get a 12 hour “ban” and receive all 503’s for the duration. If you do receive any 503’s you should stop requests immediately and take a break.

This isn’t documented everywhere, this merely comes from putting the puzzle pieces together.  Blizzard MAY have instituted a new throttling policy to the armory today, not sure. First I heard about it was from a friend developing some tools that require pulling info on everyone in a guild from the armory. At first she was getting intermittent 503 errors, then more often, and then every request was a 503 error. Still the same two hours later, just from that IP. The armory tools at MMO-Champion are no longer functioning as of today. Guildprogress.com reports today:

“The World of Warcraft armory servers appear to be experience some congestion and/or downtime at the moment that is prevent our crawlers from reaching them. Hopefully this is resolved shortly and any guilds in the queue will be crawled when their servers are fixed. Sorry for the delay!”

The armory seems to be functioning perfectly fine under normal use, but it seems to be dying for any tools that access it a lot. Does anyone have any more info on this? It would really suck if this is a permanent change, as I think third party armory based tools add a lot of functionality and usefulness to the community.

achievements, News, progression, wowprogress

WoWProgress added more detailed ratings earlier today. This update includes finer granularity for its main listings and a new second listing that includes most of the heroic dungeon achievements.

Sartharion’s Drakes

For its main listing it will now track Sartharion with one and two drakes, however each of these will be superseded by doing the next higher up one. This is so as to not punish guilds who skipped doing less drakes in order to do the more difficult version first. This does, however, give finer granularity for guilds who have yet to kill Sartharion with three drakes up. Sartharion with one and two drakes is still a primary measure of a guilds progression and it’s a great thing to be tracking. The values are thus:

• Three Drakes - 7
• Two Drakes - 5
• One Drake - 3

This puts one drake equivelent to killing Kel’Thuzad and two drakes just behind killing Malygos. I think this is a pretty good measurement of their difficulty.

Listings With Achievements

They have added a second listing that adds a lot of weightings to the various heroic achievements. People voiced their displeasure of all these achievements counting towards official progression because they aren’t actually boss kills. Still, it’s interesting to track the info and you can discern how much initiative and perhaps how “hardcore” a guild is based on its non-progression achievements. Here is a list of the scoring for achievements:

• 10 - Glory of the Raider
• 10 - The Immortal
• 10 - You Don’t Have an Eternity
• 8 - The Twilight Zone (Normal)
• 7 - The Twilight Zone (Heroic)
• 3 - Make Quick Werk of Him
• 3 - Shocking!
• 3 - Spore Loser
• 2 - The Safety Dance
• 2 - Arachnophobia
• 2 - And They Would All Go Down Together
• 1 - Momma Said Knock You Out
• 1 - The Hundred Club
• 1 - Just Can’t Get Enough

I think these scores are a good start, but they need work. First off, The Immortal is significantly harder than You Don’t Have an Eternity. You can practice killing Malygos in 5 minutes, there are strats and vids available, and it’s honestly not all that hard. In three attempts using the correct strategy we came within 20 seconds of doing it. If we hadn’t accidentally killed him we would have done it within a few more attempts. Something you can knock out in a couple hours should not be worth nearly so much. It’s only valued high because so few have done it, but many will do it in short order as the strategy to do it becomes widely known. The Immortal, on the other hand, cannot be practiced over and over again. There’s no real strategy to it. It simply requires your entire raid to play extremely smart and very conservatively. If I had to score it, I’d put You Don’t Have an Eternity around 5 or 6 points and The Immortal up to like 15 points. Yes, it’s really that hard.

Next, I’d probably up the value on normal mode Twilight Zone to like 10 points. This is a very hard encounter which most agree is harder than the heroic version. There is some debate in the comments of the site as to whether normal mode achievements should be included at all. It is my opinion that the difficult ones should. If the encounter is difficult enough to challenge top guilds then it is worthy of being rated. Just because it only takes 10 people instead of 25 should have no bearing on its inclusion.

The final thing I’d do is reduce the value of all the 2 point achievements to 1 point, and all the 1 points to 0.5. The fact is that all of these achievements are extremely easy and can be done without too much effort on top of normal. The total value of these achievements put together should not be enough to outweigh even a single one of the more difficult achievements.

On the whole I think it’s great to have this more detailed listing available. Personally, I would like these achievements added to the main progression, though probably at a much lower weighting than is listed here compared to actual boss kills. Hopefully in the future WoWProgress will come up with an elegant way to integrate the ratings in.

elitistjerks, News, Recruitment

After years of being begged, the admins of Elitistjerks.com have finally added guild recruitment listings…for a price. In order to post a recruitment ad you need to pay $25 or have a Patron account which costs about $50 a year. The recruitment post is removed after a month which makes it extremely advantageous to fork out the cash and get a Patron account rather than paying for each ad.

This level of exposure is well worth the price despite the cost. EJ is the most highly trafficked World of Warcraft forum aside from the official forums and the quality of player visiting the forum is far higher than the average player you’ll meet in game. At any given time there’s between 1500 and 3000 people browsing the forums.