Warcraft Experience

Nefarian is down!! Woot! I wasn’t there to see it but I’ll talk it up for them anyway. Congrats guys on all your hard work!

Colors were black and bronze, kill was textbook execution (pardon the pun) on the first pull of the evening.

The Loot:
[item]Bloodfang Chestpiece[/item] - Wendra - Lobster Magnet
[item]Netherwind Robes[/item] - Overstrand - BERSERKER
[item]Head of Nefarian[/item] - Moonwinna - Red Bull Order
[item]Cloak of the Broodlord[/item] - Trubben - Lobster Magnet
[item]Therazane’s Link[/item] - Kurosawa - BERSERKER

Blizzard has released a map of the Outland!

Beyond the Dark Portal lies Outland, the broken remains of the Orcs’ homeworld, Draenor. Amid the ruins of this world, the survivors of the cataclysm are trying to rebuild, and in other parts of Outland, life continues to thrive. Those brave enough to make the journey through the Dark Portal will find new allies and enemies, as well as limitless adventure beyond an untamed horizon.

We’ve just released an interactive map showing all of Outland’s dungeons, Alliance and Horde settlements, faction bases and neutral cities as well as new screenshots of each region. Check out the interactive Outland map now!

Just when buffing and zoning in was looking up, it looks like we are going to have to suffer with losing our temp buffs when zoning again, for a while longer:

We have implemented a hotfix to all realms during today’s maintenance which we had originally scheduled to release with patch 1.12 that changes the functionality of temporary item buffs (e.g. poisons, sharpening stones and shaman weapon buffs.) While we only just recently allowed the affects of these temporary item buffs to persist upon zoning and logging out, due to the extra demand it was placing on our hardware we’ve decided that for the time being, it was best to revert the change. We do anticipate this functionality will be available again once the anticipated hardware upgrades have been completed in preparation for the Burning Crusade’s release.

Let loose on Friday via Gamespy, Blizzard has this to say:

…Blizzard is working a difficulty system into its dungeons. Basically, it works like this: As you’re leveling up, you run through all the Outland instances at their default difficulty. You’ll earn gear commensurate for your level, and the challenges will be tuned as such. Once you hit 70, however, your group leaders will have the option of running dungeons on “Elite” difficulty.

Also in the article is the annoucement that no raids in the expansion will be above 25 people max, that’s right, the 40 man raid days are done… for now.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg people, there is a ton more information to be read in this article, so you will definitely want to check it out

http://games.slashdot.org/games/06/08/12/1622247.shtml

In the expansion, there will be NO MORE 40 man raids. Every raid will become 25 man capped, even the previous ones (Naxx,AQ”40″,MC, and BWL). Players will now have to rely on Skill and not just power in numbers. This has also been confirmed on the forums multiple times.

This will means wonders for all sorts of smaller guilds, as well as the bigger ones that want to run multiple events on the same evening. All I can say is - awesome move Blizz!

GameAmp have updated their world maps section with maps from all five wings of Naxxramas. They contain positions of each boss as well as details of their loot tables.

Click here to take a look GameAmp’s map section.

This is the Firemaw strategy that we are currently using in BWL, (shamelessly pulled from the Inner Sanctum website) let’s hope we can take him down soon. We made great progress in there last nite.

Firemaw

Wing Buffet: Frontal cone knockback (Aggro reducer).

Flame Buffet: Inflicts 139 - 161 Fire damage to an enemy and increases the Fire damage it takes by 150 for 60 seconds.

Shadow Flame: Inflicts 3938 - 5062 Shadow damage to enemies in a cone in front of the caster (If the target doesn’t have Onyxia Scale cloak, will receive a DoT that ticks for 2500, it’s a certain death.

The Pull

Firemaw patrols through the entire room after Broodlord. The first thing you face after killing Broodlord is some of BWL’s few “trashmobs”, how to kill those are explained in the BWL trashmob guide. Cleat the pack in the doorway, since you are going to tank Firemaw there.

When that is done clear the pack on the right-hand side as well before pulling the boss.

Once that is done buff up get ready for Firemaw. Once the room is clear he should be an easy pull.

The fight

Once the pull is made the warrior needs to get Firemaw into position.

Firemaw should be facing the iron fence to the left of the Broodlord doorway. This position is chosen due to the knock back

We’ll be talking about this knockback for a while since it’s a potential raid wiper due to our placement. As shown in the picture the offtanks placement is strategically placed. Once Firemaw is about to do the Wing Buffet the offtank slaps him a taunt, if it gets resisted be papered for your secondary taunt, challenging shout, if successful the offtank should be knocked into Broodlords room and out of harms way. Now you can’t always rely on this since they will both get resisted from time to time and the main tank will receive an occasional knockback that will displace Fremaw and put the entire raid in danger.

The rest of the raid should be standing diagonally in alignment with the main tank through the doorway as shown in the picture, this will make it so that the healers can line-of-sight the Flame Buffet and still be able to reach the tank, now as mentioned before the main tank will receive an occasional knockback from time to time changing Firemaws postion, at that time the healers will be hit by the Flame Buffet, there is nothing to do about it other than either moving out of sight or wait until the MT has him in position again.

The ranged DPS will stand with the healers, until firemaw is around 40%; there is no way for them to legitimately LoS (Line of Sight) the Flame Buffet so they have to run out in the Flame Buffet, hit him as much as they can and LoS it again and wait for its timer to run out, and go out again.

Once Firemaw is at 40% move into the next room way back to the right, there you can hide behind a little wall and still reach Firemaw. This is done due to MT getting knockbacks putting him lower on the hate list, this ensures that if he loses agro the healers won’t get the Shadowflame, no one else except for the main tank, and occasionally the offtank and rogues, should be hit by Shadowflame. We can’t underline this enough it’s VERY important for everyone to have their Onyxia Cloak equipped, especially for the close combat classes. It isn’t a vital part in the raid but we STRONGLY recommend that everyone uses it for the first few tries.

For the close combat classes, there isn’t anything else to do other than to have a very nice fire resistance gear. With that still, the close combat classes will occasionally have to run out to get healed//get rid of the flame buffet, and jump into the fight again.

Key item in this fight is fire resistance, all the tanks should have 315 or higher fire resistance it will otherwise be impossible to keep up your tank since the dot can stack up to 50 times, and then dealing 7500 dmg each tick.

Blizzard announced a few changes that have occured to bosses in the AQ instance the other day. If you are currently working through the AQ instance these changes could be significant for you.

Ouro has been hotfixed so his Quake effects deal significantly less damage.

We have also hotfixed the following changes to the C’thun encounter in Ahn’Qiraj:
- Lowered the hit points of both Giant Claw Tentacles and Giant Eye Tentacles.
- Decreased the damage caused by Ground Rupture, and made the effect resistable.
- Significantly decreased the melee damage done by Giant Eye Tentacles.

In the 1.10.1 patch, we also changed the way that C’thun identifies who is in his stomach. The faction changing debuff that was previously applied will no longer appear, but C’thun’s tentacles should not spawn in the stomach, nor should a player in the stomach be the target of C’thun’s Eye Beam.

The combination of these changes should give players more time to damage C’thun instead of dealing with tentacles, and see fewer “unavoidable, random” deaths occur due to Ground Rupture effects.

You can check out the whole thread here.