Invincible (Arthas mount) video

MMO-Champion’s most recent post is packed with Icecrown news, including some major lore-changing spoilers. Don’t click the link if you don’t want to know how things end.  Tucked in to the bottom of the post, however, is this sweet new video of Invincible, the Lich King’s mount — which has a very small chance to drop for players.

There have been other videos floating around, but this one gives a nice view of the mount from all angles and in different locations, including the Icecrown zone and Stormwind. There are clear views of Invincible’s lift-off animation, as well as its unique flying animations, which show the horse beating its wings as its legs hang below in a motion that’s distinctly different from how they move on the ground.

In the past, we’ve seen some mount blunders, with rare or expensive mounts missing animations or looking decidedly awkward when they land. But with Invincible, the design, detail and animation are all befitting a mount that will most likely be extremely rare and sought-after:

Battered Hilt: By the Numbers

19: Runs of the heroic instances where the Battered Hilt drops.

152: Number of boss encounters during those 19 runs.

3: Times the 2.6-speed, ArP-featuring abomination to Enhancement Shamans, Nighttime, has dropped.

25: Random players I’ve grouped with.

0: Battered Hilts I’ve seen so far.

Patch 3.3: Enhancement Shaman rotations

After two in-depth posts on talent spec options for Enhancement Shamans in Patch 3.3, it’s time to take a look at rotations.

Six days into Patch 3.3, I’ve had the chance to run a wide-ranging number of encounters, giving me an opportunity to test Fire Nova — the most significant change for Enhancement — in circumstances you simply can’t replicate with a target dummy. Forays into the Frozen Halls, Icecrown Citadel, Trial of the Crusader, Ulduar and OS 3D have given better insight into the situational value of Fire Nova and its priority in an Enhancement rotation.

With talents and current high-end gear, Fire Nova can crit for 5k or more on each target it hits. The spell really shines because we can stack it with any fire totem we want — including Magma Totem — while simultaneously using our melee attacks. The result is a dramatic improvement in DPS on fights involving lots of adds, as well as a solid boost to single-target DPS.

Of course, calling an Enhancement Shaman’s ability range a “rotation” is a bit misleading, because ever since Patch 3.0, we’ve had a priority system. Patch 3.3 doesn’t change that — the first priority in any situation is using a Maelstrom Weapon five-stack.

This rotation's kinda trippy.

An Enhancement Shaman’s second priority also remains the same with Stormstrike. With its built-in debuff and Glyph of Stormstrike, not only does the attack do decent damage on its own, it also makes our Earth Shocks, Lightning Bolts and Lightning Shield hit harder.

From there, things get a bit tricky. On a single-target fight, Earth Shock is usually a better bet than Fire Nova. Against one target, it simply hits harder.

But on boss fights with adds, or AoE pulls, Fire Nova surpasses Earth Shock and should be used first.

On boss fights, I like to use Lava Lash early as well — the 400 AP proc from Totem of Quaking Earth almost always activates on the First Lava lash. The high proc rate makes it possible to achieve near-100% uptime, which is well worth at least one global cooldown every 18 seconds, the duration of the buff.

Of course, Fire Nova doesn’t work without an active fire totem in play, so re-dropping Magma, Searing or Flametongue should always be a priority after Maelstrom Weapon five-stacks and Stormstrike.

Unsurprisingly, the TL;DR version is this: We don’t have a rotation. If you’re an Enhancement Shaman and you’re using a rotation, you’re doing it wrong and gimping your own DPS in the process. I’ve seen posts from some players who claim they use sequence macros, and I just don’t see how that’s possible given the range of options available to us and the varying effectiveness of those options.

In Patch 3.3 more than ever, the best Enhancement Shaman “rotation” involves paying attention and selecting the most effective ability for each encounter and each moment. Some people see that as too much “work.” If you’re one of those people, perhaps you might be interested in a Hunter or Warlock alt?

Related posts from Stormstrike:

Patch 3.3: Enhancement Shaman Talent Specs, Now With More Fire Nova

Lord Marrowgar down! The fight, from a melee perspective

The Frozen Halls: Enhancement Shaman Gear

More than just Gear(Score): An interview with Gear Score’s developer

Where the hilts at?

In my guild, one guy got a Battered Hilt on patch night, and that’s been it. No more hilts for anyone so far, and most of us (me included) have never actually seen one drop.

As I wrote earlier in the week, my group called it on patch night after we’d spent almost an hour zoning in to Forge of Souls, another 20 minutes or so zoning into Pit of Saron, and even more time trying to zone in to Halls of Reflection. So I ran two dungeons and logged off because there simply wasn’t time to do a third, especially if it was going to take us up to an hour just to get in.

Apparently Blizzard slipped in a hotfix sometime after patch night that significantly nerfed drop rates for the Battered Hilt.

There are reports of Hilts dropping like soap in prison showers, netting great weapons for the folks who had inordinate amounts of free time on patch night. I’ve even heard — from some reliable sources — reports of patch-night runs that saw two or three Hilts drop per run.

We’re five days into Patch 3.3, and I’ve run the new five-mans a total of 12 times, so I’m probably on the extreme low-end compared to some players. Maybe the fact that I haven’t seen one drop is attributable to that.

Quel'delar

But in quite a few QQ threads on this issue, players are saying they expect to see one Hilt drop per week. With a one-in-five chance of winning the role, that means it could take as many as five weeks to get a Hilt. Ouch.

The hotfix seems to have pissed off quite a few players. As one Paladin on the official forums puts it:

What bugs me is all the people that took advantage of this benefit while I was sitting outside the instance trying to get in and failing. And now I get the decreased chance of getting it. Blizzard screwed up and now they should keep the drop rate the same instead of making those that didn’t take advantage of Blizz’s screw up suffer.

But not to worry — Patch 3.3 just continues the fine tradition of rewarding people who have inhuman amounts of free time. So whether you’ve got the time to run four versions of a single raid each week, or dedicate a six-hour block to running five-mans on patch night, rest assured the rewards will be sweet!

Patch 3.3 bug: AoE is destroying Shaman totems

“Certain types” of AoE are destroying Shaman totems thanks to a bug in Patch 3.3, and thankfully Ghostcrawler’s already acknowledged the problem. He says Blizzard’s coders are “deploying a hotfix soon” to fix it.

I’m glad this issue was raised quickly, and I’m glad that despite the larger problems in Patch 3.3, GC himself jumped on the totem problem and communicated with the playerbase. Although this effects all three specs, Enhancement can be particularly hard-hit because of melee-only splash AoE damage.

Here’s Ghostcrawler’s official statement:

There is a bug where certain kinds of AE can clobber totems. Specifically anything with a chain effect which includes say Cleave and obvious things like Chain Lightning and that spiffy Shadow Bolt in the Icecrown 5-player dungeon do too much damage to totems. Actual AE effects like Whirlwind are not affected by the bug. We are deploying a hotfix soon to fix this.

Lord Marrowgar down! The fight, from a melee perspective

After dedicating last night to five-man craziness, with all its associated zone-in frustrations, my guild made its first foray into Icecrown Citadel tonight.

After getting our bearings on the trash (“Those big dudes appear like ninjas!”) we found ourselves face-to-face with Lord Marrowgar.

Marrowgar is based off an entirely new model, and he’s best described as half of a blue-tinged floating skeleton, with four disembodied skulls for a head and a jagged cleaver in his two bony hands. During the fight, he zooms around his chamber like Baron Harkonnen from Dune.

Lord Marrowgar: A Stay-Out-Of-The-Fire Check

Marrowgar doesn’t require much strategy; he’s more of a survival fight, with an emphasis on making sure players are competent and awake with a few abilities that require quick movement. There are no phases to this fight, so you can Bloodlust early — just be sure to time your Bloodlust after Bone Storm, so you don’t waste valuable uptime running away (and unable to hit) Lord Marrowgar.

From a melee perspective, the four biggest things to watch out for are:

• Coldflame – A bright blue stream of fire on the ground, similar to any number of fights in previous raids. Where Coldflame gets a bit tricky is in its speed, and in its ability to temporarily box in a player, especially when that player’s hauling ass away from the whirlwind-esque Bone Storm.
• Bone Storm – The aforementioned whirlwind-style ability, Bone Storm ticks every two seconds. As melee, if you’re still standing near the boss when it ticks, you’re going to get hit for about 4k on normal mode. Outside his fairly large hit box, the tick drops to 2k. It’s unlikely most melee will get more than 30 yards away from him, as we’ve got to negotiate around Coldflame, but after 30 yards Bone Storm only ticks for 800 damage. (Nice and easy for the ranged, eh?)
• Bone Spike Graveyard – This is an impale with a three-second cast time. It targets a random raid member and ticks for 10% of the victim’s health per second, which means raid members should call out when they’ve been hit with it so DPS can break them out quickly. Any smart raid leader will have their ranged take care of it in 25-man, but if you’re short on ranged DPS in the 10-man version, it’s a good idea to have boots with a speed enchant because you’ll be spending a lot of time running back and forth between Lord Marrowgar and the players who get hit with Bone Spike Graveyard.
• Saber Lash – This is like an amplified cleave, so your tanks are always going to be grouped up on top of each other to absorb it. However, as melee (and particularly as a squishy Enhancement Shaman) you need to keep these two things in mind: 1) Stand far back,  using Marrowgar’s wide hit box to put as much distance between you and the tanks as possible, and 2) DO NOT run to assist anyone who is standing near the tanks and takes an impale from Bone Spike Graveyard. If you do, you stand a good chance of taking a Saber Lash. Death Knights, Warriors and Ret Paladins can survive that. We cannot.

I make the latter point because I had the misfortune of taking a Saber Lash on our first attempt. A caster was hit with Bone Spike Graveyard, the tanks repositioned Marrowgar to avoid Coldflame, and suddenly I found myself with my back to Marrowgar’s axe as I tried to free my impaled guildie. On normal mode, the Saber Lash hit me for about 25k — dangerous, but survivable, for the plate-wearing melee classes, but a definite one-shot for Enhancement Shamans.

Bone Storm sounds intimidating, and on our first attempt it looked intimidating too — Marrowgar is not predictable, and he tends to change direction quickly and zoom toward a new corner of his chamber at whim. The good news is, the tick damage is relatively low on normal mode, and if you have Druids, Priests or Shamans on raid heals, topping everyone off is trivial.

Marrowgar dropped these for us tonight:

Citadel Enforcer’s Claymore

Coldwraith Bracers

Lady Deathwhisper's chamber.

Most of us were crunched for time, so we took one crack at Lady Deathwhisper before we called it for the night. Until the next episode, here’s one of the better Youtube videos detailing the Lord Marrowgar fight, with nice big text explaining the strategy and the abilities as they’re happening:

Related posts from Stormstrike:

The Frozen Halls: Enhancement Shaman Gear

Fall of the Lich King Trailer: So how easy will it be to kill Arthas?

Forge of Souls: Finally got in!

The Forge of Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched

The server and instance problems continue: Same old, same old during peak hours

On Patch Day, getting a crack at the new five-man dungeons was a privilege enjoyed only by those with inordinate amounts of free time. As I detailed last night, it took me 50 minutes of zoning and re-zoning, just to get into the Forge of Souls for the first time.

Things didn’t go much faster after graduating to the Pit of Saron, and by the time my group had finished that instance, it was so late — and the zoning problems were so persistent — that we ended up calling it.

Because it was Patch Day, and because — like everyone else — I was excited to see the inside of the three new five-man dungeons, I pushed aside some work, neglected a few other things and made the time to run those dungeons. Tonight? Not gonna happen. I have work, and work means deadlines, and missed deadlines mean I don’t make any money.

Of course, for a very large group of players, inventing free time was not an option, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who saw guildies and group members log off in frustration after varying amounts of time seeing nothing but “Instance not found” and “Additional instances cannot be launched.”

Word around the WoW blogosphere seems to echo what I wrote last night — while there’s no doubt Blizzard increased the number of available instances, and devoted more server resources to the three new dungeons, it still wasn’t enough. And despite all the best intentions, and the folks working late into the night at Blizz HQ, that does not fare well for our favorite gaming company.

For us — the players — the short-term prognosis is we’ll be bumping into the same problems: Almost everyone who was logged on during peak hours yesterday will be back tonight, banging their heads against the same lag and zone-in issues.

Over at WoW Insider, Adam Holisky details the technical points, but also points out that Blizzard — and its GMs and CMs — could do a much better job of communicating what needs to be done, what they’re doing on their own end, and when playes can expect some relief from these server overload problems. I wholeheartedly agree:

…this is still a mess, and likely will continue during prime playing time for the immediate future. So what does Blizzard need to do to solve this? There are two primary areas focus needs to be put in.

First, the instance capacity needs to be increased. If we’re seeing this now, on a patch day, imagine what it’s going to be like when Cataclysm hits and everyone of every level of gameplay will be running instances. The game will not be enjoyable for large swaths of the player base if they can’t run dungeons, and that’s a risk Blizzard probably shouldn’t take given alternative games on the horizon.

Secondly, Blizzard PR and Community Managers need to start getting the word out about this now. There is something almost psychologically defeating about seeing this error pop up again after we were told for so long that it was going away. PR and Community need to begin an immediate and massive campaign laying out the issue, what’s being done to fix it, and how long the fix might take. They don’t need to give a date, but saying something like “in the coming weeks we’ll begin expanding instance capacity again” would be a very good thing. Just letting the entire playerbase know they’re doing something is exponentially better than what they’re doing now (which is just a few blue posts buried amongst tons of others from the past few days).”

Related posts from Stormstrike:

The Frozen Halls: Enhancement Shaman Gear

Fall of the Lich King Trailer: So how easy will it be to kill Arthas?

Forge of Souls: Finally got in!

The Forge of Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched

Fall of the Lich King Trailer: So how easy will it be to kill Arthas?

Let them come. Frostmourne hungers! – The Lich King

The trailer gets me psyched to get into Icecrown Citadel and kick some ass for a shot at the Lich King, even if it doesn’t exactly give the impression that Tauren (or anyone other than humans, for that matter) are going to be the ones taking him down.

I’d also like to point out here that the trailer looks pretty damn good — and shockingly cinematic — despite the use of the in-game engine and what looks like actual gameplay footage during boss encounters.

But what really strikes me is how much better of a job Blizzard has done this time around. In The Burning Crusade, there were players who didn’t know — or care — who Illidan Stormrage was. To a lot of players, especially casuals, that was territory that belonged to the hard-core raiders and elite guilds, who were privileged to be able to see the inside of places like Black Temple.

Not so in Wrath of the Lich King — Arthas and his deeds pervade everything, and every player feels them, from the Lich King’s influence in questlines large and small, to cameo appearances in dungeons like Drak’tharon Keep and Trial of the Champion. Upon landing in Northrend, there’s a very real sense that both factions, and their leaders, are really gearing up for something. And even when things began to border on the ridiculous, as they did on the Argent Tournament grounds, the designers kept reminding us of our ultimate goal for this expansion.

"Can you feel it, my son, closing in all around you? The Light's justice has been awakened. The sins of the past have finally caught up to you. You will be called to account for all the atrocities you've committed, the unspeakable horrors you've let loose upon this world, and the dark, ancient powers you've enslaved."

The Burning Crusade’s story sounded an awful lot like an L. Ron Hubbard mythos — this guy was corrupted, and stole the souls of these people, who in turn seek vengeance for wrongs done to them by space aliens, and in the mean time here’s a parade of lesser evil creatures, who work for increasingly more evil dudes, and…you get it. I spent the better part of two years playing through the damn thing and I’m still confused on how it all ties together.

But not Wrath. In Arthas, Blizzard created a real boogeyman for Azeroth. Players will enjoy killing him.

The question is, in this era of universally accessible raid content and varying tiers of difficulty, how easy will it be? If ‘normal mode’ Arthas is a pushover, the entire story feels a little cheap, especially since killing Arthas on normal difficulty is the only route to the heroic Arthas.

It just won’t feel right unless Arthas is the most badass encounter players have seen to date. He should be powerful. Ridiculously powerful. And none of this relying on adds or cheap gimmicks — as the Lich King, Arthas should radiate real, overwhelming force. The story doesn’t demand “OMG nerf it i wantz epicz,” it demands an epic battle and a memorable challenge. Here’s to hoping we all bang our heads against this particular raid boss.

Related posts from Stormstrike:

The Frozen Halls: Enhancement Shaman Gear

Forge of Souls: Finally got in!

The Forge of Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched

Shamans: “Terrified of moving”

Forge of Souls: Finally got in!

A short update on my own patch night adventures: I finally got in to Forge of Souls, which we decided to try on heroic.

In all, it took almost 50 minutes of trying to zone in, waiting out two-to-five minute load screens, and getting spat back out of with the error: “Transfer Aborted: Instance not found.”

In the group was a guild tank, a guild mage, a pug warrior, and a pug resto shaman healer. We went in fresh, overpowered the first boss without looking up any strategy, and then made our way to Devourer of Souls. He’s a tougher fight than any of us expected, with a wide-ranging beam-style ability reminiscent of Mimiron and heavy AoE splash damage. He’s also got an ability that functions like a Soul Link, sharing incoming damage with a random player for a short duration — so the whole group has to be on its toes, ready to stop DPS at a second’s notice.

We didn’t have any real strategy for Devourer of Souls, other than to interrupt his Phantom Blast, have everyone — including the tank — stop DPS during Mirrored Soul, and stay clear of Wailing Souls. As our mage pointed out, “It’s not a balls-out DPS fight, it’s a survival fight.”

Devourer of Souls: An angry-lookin' bastard with a shrieking voice and some nasty abilities.

Unfortunately, I nubbed it up and didn’t hand in the initial quest until after we’d killed the first boss, so after 20 minutes of group-building and re-zoning (there’s still a big crowd outside, and it’s late) I’m back in Forge of Souls, this time on regular mode.

Update: I notice some people coming to this blog seem to be having difficulty finding the instance. The Forge of Souls entrance is on the west side of Icecrown Citadel’s upper ramparts. It’s quicker to leave Dalaran from the landing — just fly west, circle around the largest spire at Icecrown, and look for a rampart that leads deep into the citadel: That’s the entrance to the Forge of Souls.

Good luck.

Update: Ran regular, which went much smoother despite having an all-pug run, and finished the quest. Now I’m headed into the Pit of Saron…

The Forge of Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched

Ah, patch night. In our rush to experience the new content, most of us probably neglected to consider every toon that hasn’t been logged on in three months — and their mothers — will be online tonight, hoping to try out the new dungeons and raid.

It’s shades of Magister’s Terrace and Sunwell, compounded by the fact that the Forge of Souls serves as an artificial bottleneck — you have to complete Forge — and its associated quest — before moving on to the next dungeon in the Frozen Halls.

And so it creates situations like this:

I’m going on about 40 minutes here trying to zone in — stepping through the portal, waiting on a five-minute loading screen, then finding myself spit back out on the other side.

Not fun.

I wonder what kind of discussions went on during Blizzard’s Patch 3.3 development meetings? They would have definitely anticipated this, but I wonder to what degree. Are there more servers handling the instance load for places like Forge of Souls? I’d hope so.

Someone had to anticipate this bottleneck — it’s not particularly good design to create a game-imposed bottleneck like this for such a highly-anticipated patch.

In the meantime, I’m going to try again. Wish me luck.