The Lunar Festival returns to Azeroth in a cascade of pyrotechnics on Sunday, January 22! With the start of a new year, elders of generations past manifest around the world to impart their wisdom upon all who would listen. Should you encounter these venerable spirits in your travels and take the time to heed their wisdom, they may even pass along tokens of their gratitude — Coins of Ancestry, the lessons of a past age in physical form. Gather enough of these Coins of Ancestry and the Cenarion Circle will open to you their stores of celebratory fireworks, trinkets, garbs, and recipes!
The Cenarion Circle have even more cause to celebrate this year than any previous, for this year also marks the first Lunar Festival since the return of many Ancients that had fallen in battles past: Goldrinn, Malorne, Aviana, and Cenarius himself. But this celebration is muted by the eternal torment of one of their own — Omen, blessed by the moon goddess Elune, has risen again from the depths of Moonglade’s lake. Driven mad by the Burning Legion’s tainted magics during the War of the Ancients, Elune’s blessing of immortality means that he will forever be cursed to return in his maddened state at the advent of a new year. Heroes are called to help ease this tormented Ancient’s suffering, in the hopes that perhaps next year will see him return with a clearer mind.

Lunar Festivities end Sunday, February 12. Check out Wowhead’s Lunar Festival Guide for detailed quest and item information, before this event fades into the past once again!

source form: battle

The spell can also be disabled by talking to Lord Afrasastrasz at the beginning of Dragon Soul, if a raid wishes to attempt the encounters without the aid of the Dragon Aspects.

For those of you who raided in Firelands and/or Icecrown you’re no doubt aware that as time goes on we want to keep people progressing by adjusting the difficulty. For any number of reasons a group may be having difficulty on a specific encounter each week, and our intent in adjusting the content is to ensure the ability to keep progressing, enjoying the content, and gearing up. With Icecrown we progressively buffed the players, and while this slow progression (and ability to opt-out of the buff) were both beneficial, it led to an expectation of your characters power, and once you left the raid you could certainly feel less effective. For Firelands we attempted to fix that by nerfing the content instead of buffing players, but we nerfed the content difficulty all at one time, which was counterproductive for players who really didn’t need as severe a change as we made. With Dragon Soul we’re attempting to do the best of both by having a progressive nerf to the content, keeping player power constant while providing small increases in assistance over a long period of time, as well as allowing players to opt-out of the assistance by speaking to Lord Afrasastrasz.

We hope you continue to enjoy Dragon Soul, and that these changes encourage you to attempt a higher difficulty, or just keep pushing to down that next boss.

source form: battle

“Wipe it!” my raid leader bellows. I whip off my headset in disgust and sink back in my chair, burying my face in my trembling hands and tuning out the usual post-wipe Mumble drivel. After collecting myself, I pull up any logs and try to figure out what happened. Could I have done anything to change the outcome? In most cases, the answer is a yes. There is always something that any single player could have done differently in the moments leading up to a fateful wipe.

Last week’s column about pushing healing performance seemed to have struck a chord with several readers. I wanted to take a moment and examine some of the commenters’ approaches to rankings, meters and healing logs.

If you want to play at a higher level than you are now, you must start with your mind. Blaming other players because you are being outplayed is not going to help you get any better.

The wrong approach

We’ve all seen these excuses before. I’ve raged out multiple times in Counterstrike back in the day, as well. I’ll give you some examples of my excuses:

• Lag
• Crappy computer
• Better-geared opponent
• Overpowerd opponent
• Better-gemmed and -enchanted opponent

That last point is a true story. I almost a blew a gasket when I heard it. I’ve run into so many players like that in the guild, in the world and in different games. These are players who tend to blame their mistakes and low showing on something else.

Understanding players immediately notice when a player legitimately lags out or disconnects (instead of “accidentally” hitting the modem). It’s unfortunate, but it happens once in a while. However, there’s that subset of players who seem to want to blame their misfortunes on something that isn’t them. For whatever reason, these players refuse to believe that they are the cause of their own lack of skill.

I have a hunch that such players are too proud to admit that they screwed up somehow.

The right approach

When they get out DPSed or outhealed on the meters, or if they happen to die, good players immediately ask themselves what they need to do to not allow that from happening again. Then they go out and do it.

Learning, analyzing and correcting errors is the key. The players who advance the most quickly aren’t that way solely due to their gear. It’s because they’re adept at adjusting and reacting to the situations being thrown at them.

When I bring up the Raid Finder tool, many players slump or groan. I rub my hands excitedly. The Raid Finder is the greatest tool in the world for healers who are just starting it. You have player skills ranging from the extremely new to the somewhat knowledgeable to the skilled experts. There is such a large spread and gap from top to bottom, and their well-being is at your fingertips!

Measuring success

In hockey, victory is determined by whoever scores the most goals in the opposing net.
In the 100-meter dash, the winner is whoever can run that distance in the shortest amount of time. In a hot dog eating contest, you may as well just forfeit if this guy is competing against you.

New healers starting out measure their success by asking themselves one question: “Did I keep my assigned targets alive?”

Fair enough. It’s a solid way for beginning healers to gauge their capabilities. I’d use it for any dungeons, heroic dungeons and specific assignments within raids. But for a healer who is trying to progress through the challenging encounters in the game and break into hard modes, that question just isn’t enough. It’s agonizing to hear players who are in progressive raiding guilds making these types of comments and not giving a crap about self-improvement.

If I were in a raid group that killed the Warlord boss with one tank, two warlocks, a few mages and only half the healers alive, I’d be extremely embarrassed and disappointed. Naturally, more leniency is granted if it’s a first or second kill.

Start looking at meters and those logs. Stop being satisfied with “at least the boss is dead.” Start setting healing benchmarks for yourself. Lay out your own healing numbers in the first week, then see what you can do in week two to beat it. For example, I’ll time healing cooldowns earlier just so I can use them again later.

Another trick I learned is to not set objective-oriented goals; instead, set process-oriented goals. For example, instead of saying you’re going to try to put out 30k healing per second, say that by the end of the encounter, you want to have cast Circle of Healing 40 times.

Don’t be dismissive of logs and meters. They’re an asset if properly used.

And ignore the bloody idiots who slyly like to beat your numbers over your head with theirs. Focus on your own first until you’ve developed the mental fortitude to not let that stuff get under your skin. I’ll make it a secondary objective of being the best possible healer in the rankings and numbers. My main goal is making sure I went up from the previous week.

To be a better healer, you must change your mindset. All the theorycrafting, stats, gems and whatever optimizations aren’t going to do much for you if your mind isn’t in it from the beginning. Don’t be satisfied with 15k healing per second when you know there are other healers around you with the same level of gear as you who are pushing 25k.

source form: wowjoystiq

If you’re a WoW player heading to a galaxy far, far away while your raid takes some time off (or you just like seeing what’s out there), you’ll find some great tips over at Massively.

source form: wowjoystiq

While we’re on a tear talking about what’s been going wrong with tanking in Cataclysm, perhaps we should talking about the mother of all design mistakes foisted upon paladins in this expansion pack. I talk of the block cap in general and the idea of having the protection paladin mastery revolve around block chance in particular. While achieving the cap and working around it is in many ways fun, it was also a terrible move on the part of the class designers to allow such a possibility, for multiple reasons.

The mechanics of block chance

A huge part of the what makes buffing block chance a bad design flows from how WoWoperates the combat table. To briefly explain: Whenever a boss attempts to hit you, a 1-to-100 die roll is made, and the outcome lands on a scale that is constantly shifting based on your stats. At the lower range are outcomes like avoidance and block, and at the higher range are outcomes like normal hit and critical hit.

As your avoidance and block chances increase, because they’re at the lower end, they eventually crowd out the stuff at the higher end. With enough avoidance and block, normal and critical hits fall off the table. The roll is restricted to within that 1-to-100 range, and you just can’t roll anything but what you’ve stacked the deck with anymore.

(I wrote in depth about the combat table in a previous column. If my bar napkin explanation is lacking, I definitely recommend reading that piece first.)

When you’re starting out as a fresh 85, this isn’t a problem. You just don’t have enough dodge, parry, or block to reach that height. However, after you start raiding, it won’t be long before ilevel scaling takes over and the higher numbers of mastery and avoidance stats allow you to accumulate that stack. It’s inevitable.

And on top of that, unlike avoidance stats, block doesn’t suffer from diminishing returns. It’s impossible to ever hit the kind of avoidance levels we saw at the end of The Burning Crusade. It is not impossible to accumulate an equal amount of block chance, as there’s never any point where adding more block becomes prohibitive. Up to the cap. Which is another issue in of itself.

This wasn’t a big deal in earlier expansions, where blocking was for small hits and trash. With the dawn of Cataclysm, though, the stat got a new lease on life. Suddenly, it could remove 30% of the damage from any physical hit that was block. Overnight (with the release of 4.0), it became our best stat.

That’s the ultimate problem with block chance. Because of the lack of diminishing returns and because of its potency as you accumulate more and more of it, it exaggerates the poor design of the one-roll combat table. There is only the inevitability of capping when one is allowed to increase (with no diminishment) a value in a static, limited system. There can be no other outcome.

Stylistically lacking

Let’s step back from the mechanics and talk a bit about the visuals. Just at its face, the block chance mastery is invariably disappointing. Here is a stat — block chance — that existed in the game up until 4.0 and was removed because block was considered either boring or broken (with the verdict oscillating back and forth, seemingly dependent on what time of day it was), yet instead of being completed wiped from the face of Azeroth as one might expect after being so derided, it was repackaged with a shiny, new bow and forced upon the two shield tank classes as mastery.

Mastery! The glimmering new stat that was supposed to be the hallmark of class design inCataclysm! Other people in our raid are sending shadowy clones of themselves at the boss or (let’s be more generic) getting some additional X every time they do Y; we get the returned and renamed stat which was stamped as fit for deleting.

And you thought it was insulting that they took the pre-nerf version of one of our abilities and gave it to us as a four-piece tier bonus.

In addition, not only do we have the laziest mastery design in the game, we also have the only mastery that has a hard cap. Once we have 102.4% avoidance plus block chance, any further mastery itemization we add onto our pile is completely wasted. All the additional block chance we place on top of that tumbles right off along with normal hits and crits.

At least warriors get an additional value from every point of mastery they add above the soft cap of total combat table coverage. I’m not saying it’s optimal to go beyond that, but considering how easy it is for us to reach total CTC and how hard it is for them to do the same, you’d think it’d make sense for the situations to be reversed and paladins to get a little something else from our mastery, to keep the stat somewhat worthwhile after 102.4%.

The sleeping giant

The biggest sin of our mastery and of the block mechanic in general is how dangerous it is to balance in the final analysis.

When patch 4.0 hit during the waning days of Wrath, we were told that it was OK with paladins to have a block chance mastery paired with an amazing new incarnation of block, because no way, no how would they ever be able to cap. Diminishing returns? Oh no, not needed. The numbers just wouldn’t be there.

Never mind that at the end of Wrath, the introduction of reforging in 4.0 allowed raiding tanks to block cap for their final weeks in Icecrown Citadel.

But even before that, back in the Cataclysm beta, someone on the official tanking forum ran the numbers on the gear available in 5-man heroics and saw that it was already possible (admittedly with some heavy stacking) to block cap as a paladin. And that’s before even collecting raiding gear. In response, Blizzard nerfed the mastery, reducing how much block chance we’d get per point as well as the base block chance from the mastery, but as a consolation, upped the value of a successful block to 40% damage reduction (with the old, passive Holy Shield activated). This was the version that made it to launch.

That was the first and last time Blizzard would attempt to rein in block in Cataclysm.

Then throughout 4.2, we played the Will They or Won’t They? game as Damocles’ Nerf Sword dangled above out heads. Finally, Blizzard announced it wasn’t happy with the idea of paladins block capping, but it wasn’t going to bother to fix it in 4.2 because there wasn’t time to deal with the potential balance fallout.

And again, 4.3 rolls around — and not only are paladins block capping, but warriors are, too (thanks again to the immutable flow of scaling over time). Paladins are shedding mastery left and right, as the stat has become a nuisance even to those of us in normal modes. Sure, it made for a fun minigame to balance our stats, but there is something deeply wrong with how low level the shrugging off of mastery is these days.

Now, at the last tier of the expansion, mastery is akin to hit chance for a DPS player, something you cap and then spend an inordinate amount of time cursing under your breath every time you are burdened with more of it, as you must find a way to not lose any itemization.

Ultimately, even with the rollback in stats incoming with a new expansion, this isn’t exactly a sustainable environment. Mists of Pandaria needs to do something radical to the protection paladin mastery to keep it balanced, keep it interesting, and keep it from once again being a ticking time bomb. Block chance is too powerful (and yet, paradoxically, too boring) a stat for us to put all our eggs into its basket. It’s time for a change and to correct the horrible design mistake that has hung around our necks since Deathwing first tore the world asunder.

source form: wowjoystiq

Read the article about a day in the life of Web Content Manager Geoff Fraizer now!

source form: battle

The voting was close, but the contest is now over. The winners were selected by tallying the votes we received as of November 18 from both NA and EU, and we’re ready to announce the results!

Please join us in congratulating our 10 winners, listed in order of placement:

1. Mary Booth, “Maiev Shadowsong” – 2426 votes
2. Kathleen Elliott, “Sister Benedron” (Priest in Avatar set) – 2311 votes
3. Lyz Brickley, “Mylune” – 2292 votes
4. Jojo Chen, “Tyrael’s Secret” – 1828 votes
5. Tony Malcolm, “StarCraft II Marine” – 1244 votes
6. Rebecca Hamilton, “Malis Vitterfolk, Shaman in Volcanic set” – 824 votes
7. Christina Estrada, “Paladin in Regalia of Immolation” – 727 votes
8. Joseph Grasso, “Paladin in Judgment set” – 671 votes
9. Asher Augenstine, “Death Knight” – 500 votes
10. Martha Robertson, “Gnome Spy in-a-mailbox” – 382 votes

The top three costumes have earned their creators cash prizes of $1,000, $750, and $500. Fourth, fifth, and sixth place will each receive a SteelSeries prize package that includes 5H V2 Headphones, a 7G Keyboard, and an Ikari Optical Mouse. Runners-up beginning with seventh place will each earn a World of Warcraft virtual pet package that includes Lil’ Ragnaros, Moonkin Hatchling, Lil’ K.T., Pandaren Monk, and Lil’ XT.

Congratulations again to all of our BlizzCon costume contestants. You all did fantastic work, and we thank you for sharing your creations with the community!

source form: battle

Moments ago, Daxxari announced that Battle.net is coming down for immediate urgent maintenance. Players logged in to Battle.net should be able to play as normal, but the system may prevent people from logging on. Maintenance is expected to last from 2:30 p.m. PST to 4:30 p.m. PST.

 Daxxari announces urgent Battle.net maintenance

source form: joystiq

I am very glad that Blizzard is changing these items’ classifications and making the Raid Finder even more fair for players. So far, the Raid Finder has been an enormous success, and with some tweaks and changes down the road, it’s here to stay in a big way. Hit the jump for the announcement and full list of updated classes that can roll need on many Dragon Soul items in the Raid Finder.

 Nethaera explains Raid Finder loot changes

source form: joystiq

Don’t forget to check out The Daily Quest and our Weekly Podcast Roundup to find out what else is going on in the WoW community. And if you have a news tip, feel free to drop us a lineand let us know.

Looking For Raid-Need Plus Updates

source form: joystiq