No Blog Posts For a Few Days

Just making this quick post to let everyone know that I will be afk for the next few days because I am going on a trip and will not have time to do any posts. I hope everyone has a nice weekend and hopefully I'll be back and able to get a post up by Wednesday.

WoW Patch 4.1 Announced

Today Blizzard announced that patch 4.1 is well underway and soon will be available for testing on the PTR. Apparently Blizzard saw the introduction of a level 85 heroic version of the old instances Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines as a success, something I cannot disagree with as the new Deadmines was a lot of fun, because they are adding in the old troll raids Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman as level 85 five man heroics. These two dungeons will be more challenging than the other 5 mans but will drop epic gear of the 353 item level which is just below current raid loot.

I am not really sure of what to think of this; it does seem like Blizzard just recycling old content but keep in mind in Wrath we didn't see knew heroics until later on so some new stuff is better than none. Also I really enjoyed those raids back in the day and feel they are great instances. One major thing that will excite some people is that new versions of the no longer attainable mounts, the bear, tiger, and raptor will drop in these new heroics. These new mounts will be different in some way from the originals meaning people who own the originals get to keep the unique mount they earned forever ago. As someone who has an Amani War Bear from the timed run back in Burning Crusade I am very happy that they didn't just make the same bear drop.

Moonkin is happy his bear stays unique.

These are not the only additions in 4.1. New raids are expected but have not yet been announced. There are a bunch of class changes incoming and warriors are getting a pretty nifty new ability. The last thing I saw on Blizzard's post is that they are working on an in game looking for guild system; I think this is a great addition especially with the focus on guilds Cataclysm has brought.

The Blizzard blog post can be found at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2356431#blog.

WoW Battleground Win Percentages

Recently MMO-Champion released a graph depicting battleground win percentages for Alliance and Horde. They got these numbers by mass scanning characters on the armory and compiling their battleground statistics. They do note that even though the number of people scanned is huge, don't take the stats as 100% truth; it is very hard to gather large amounts of data from the armory.

Now before you go into a rage over "imbalance" make sure to look at the percents on the left. The lowest is 42% and the highest is 58% meaning the look of the graph is a bit deceiving. Overall Horde only wins about 9% more than alliance but I suppose the old idea that horde is better at PvP is somewhat true. What I find funny is that the most "balanced" battleground, by that I mean the one alliance can actually win at, is Alterac  Valley which just so happens to be the only one without a mirrored map. I'm sorry but Frostwolf Keep is a much bigger pain to defend than Dun Baldar, stupid bridge. AV was my favorite battleground though before they nerfed the crap out of it and turned it into a zergfest.

As horde I find it appropriate to say:

Minecraft Bank Design

A long time ago before my server decided to just use commands to spawn items I constructed a bank for us to store our precious materials; as you can see it is small on the outside but is in fact quite spacious.

Twin staircases lead downward underground to where all the materials are stored.

Above is the main large room with two hallways that branch off to hold more materials, each hallway has a theme that keeps like things in the same place making it easy to find what you are after.

At the end of one hallway is a secret room, normally there is a cobblestone block hiding it but destroy that and there is a ladder downward to where some of the really interesting stuff is kept, stuff only available on the server by using spawn commands.

That's my bank, it isn't the most elaborate but it got the job done. Sometime I'm going to make a huge fancy bank  just for show, full of vaults and all that fun stuff.

How to Nuke as Zerg!

And that's not all, there is so much more that you can do with this awesome thing that Blizzard put into the game that many people are not aware about. All you need is an infestor with neural parasite researched; find a way to neural parasite an SCV that is out of position, mabye one that is out scouting, moving from one expansion to another, or just one from a successfully attacked expansion. Now once the little guy is under your control order him to build a commend center, this will cost you minerals but is definitely worth it. Keep chain neural parasiting him until the command center is finished. If your opponent is smart he will move in to try and save or kill the SCV stopping you, so defend it all all costs!

Once it is done just kill off the SCV, lift the command center off, and drop it somewhere safe. Hell you can drop it at a mineral patch and expand there if you want. You pretty much have a terran army under your command now, all SCVs produced at the CC will be completely under your comtrol, use them to harvest minerals and build things for you! Be aware that all this costs you minerals and supply, but it is well worth it!

Now you can produce whatever terran unit you want, think battlecruisers will compliment your brood lords? Go for it! Having trouble defending your hatcheries? Throw some siege tanks down at them! My favorite has to be ghosts though because nukes are just so damn fun, and the last thing a terran player expects a zerg to do is nuke him! Just build some ghosts and drop some NUCLEAR FRICKEN BOMBS!

Is it the most effective strategy? No, but it sure is fun; a great way to screw with people. And who doesn't love nuclear armaments?

Trick to Harass Siege Tanks as Zerg

Terran players love their siege tanks about as much as they love their wall ins and a line of siege tanks backed up by marines can be tough to crack. I recently found out about a neat trick that will harass and soften up the siege tanks while keeping your forces (mostly) out of harms way. 

The key to the strat is that when sieged up the tanks deal area of effect damage to everything, including friendlies, around their target; that's how they chew holes in your blobs so quickly. To exploit this AoE get a few infestors and research burrow. Burrow them and have them drop some infested terrans, one at a time, into the siege tanks like so:

The tanks will turn around and fire on the egg, damaging friendlies! Keep this up and you can severely soften up or even destroy the Terran forces. It is also quite annoying for the player to deal with.

One thing to note here, send in one infestor at a time or at least keep them spread out. That way the player cannot catch more than one infestor with a scan which will reduce your losses. Do as I say not as I do.

Changes to WoW's Vote to Kick System

There have been lots of complaints concerning the vote to kick system in dungeon groups; a new hotfix recently came out that fixes some problems but also creates another. Here are the "fixes:"

• If a party member remains outside of a dungeon for more than 3 minutes, they become eligible for removal, regardless of other Vote Kick restrictions.
• When players queue as a group with a tank or a healer, and the tank or healer drops group (or is kicked) within the first 5 minutes, all of the other players who queued with them are removed from the group as well.
• If there is a group of 3 or more friends and someone in that group initiates a Vote Kick of a random party member, it now requires 4 votes to kick the player, instead of the standard 3 votes.
• The penalty for using the Vote Kick feature too often is not issued to a player who kicks someone with whom they queued for a dungeon (i.e. the party member being selected for removal is not a player randomly selected via the Dungeon Finder).
• The penalty for using the Vote Kick feature too often will be issued much more quickly to players who join as a party of 4 and kick the randomly selected 5th player.
• The penalty for using the Vote Kick feature too often will now not allow the player to initiate a Vote Kick for 2 hours, up from 45 minutes.

The first one is great, it fixes the problem of people griefing or just holding the group up so they can finish one more daily.The second is there because, tanks especially, were selling fast ques to dps then dropping group to make some quick cash which was annoying as it held up the other people who legitimately waited out their que. The third change is where problems can arise, if a group of 3 ques and its placed with a group of 2 the 2 can do whatever they want and are immune to kicking. Also it removes majority rule which, in my opinion, should stand in dungeon groups; yes it sucks that groups of 3 are obnoxious sometimes but in my experience it doesn't happen all that often, especially with the penalties for using the kick feature too much.

Fourth change is nice I suppose but it won't effect much, the only time I can remember kicking somebody I grouped with was as a joke and we invited him right back. The last two are tricky to say much on and since I haven't actually pugged anything in the dungeon finder since Wrath (thank god) I can't come up with much of an argument for or against. I will say though that being unable to kick a troll / griefer / ninja / imbecile from your group because of the time restriction is very annoying. I remember in Wrath me and my friends would resort to trolling somebody out of the group, and it worked pretty well sometimes =D.

That's all for today sorry for the late post and no post yesterday; I've been a bit busy recently but I plan to have a good post up everyday this coming week, hopefully a bit earlier too.