The Care and Feeding of Warriors takes this week to look at what your newly 80 fury warrior should be doing. Matthew Rossi hit 80 back before you could pick up iLevel 232 gear by running heroics. Heck, it didn’t even exist in game yet. Get off his lawn.
While the intro is mock grumpy, the basic message is accurate enough. It’s a good time to hit 80 with your aspiring fury warrior. The hit and expertise soft caps have never been easier to hit and with the dungeon finder; you can rapidly acquire solid gear that will allow you to begin raiding almost immediately, if that’s what you want to do. You can also PvP … Fury lacks in arenas but can solidly perform in battlegrounds. And PvP is both another source for solid gear and a reasonably fun pastime for a fury, with the playstyle meshing well with battlegrounds and Wintergrasp’s chaotic melee tumult.
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Kins World of Warcraft
Last week I discussed the basics of the “ratting” profession in EVE Online, from picking a good system to three popular ratting strategies. If you’re planning to hunt NPCs in nullsec, of course, you’ll need to get there first. Pilots who aren’t in an alliance with secure access to nullsec will have to run the gauntlet from empire space to their chosen ratting system. The entry points into EVE’s nullsec regions are often camped during peak hours and you can expect to run into roaming gangs. Things get a little easier once you’re at your destination, but you can still expect to see the occasional pilot or gang passing through the system. Your ability to get into nullsec safely and your efficiency at ratting will be determined largely by the ship you’re using and how it’s set up. For someone who’s never been to nullsec before, setting up a ship for the task and heading into the void can be a daunting task.
In this article, I look at selecting the appropriate ship for ratting, some popular ship setups and important safety tips that will help keep your ship safe in hostile territory.
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Kiuperli EVE Online
We’re always mindful that not everybody plays the game in the same way, or has the same experience on different servers or factions, but every so often a certain madness seizes us and we feel the urge to … tell the truth. In that vein, I am pleased (sort of) to present The Cynic’s Guide to World of Warcraft.
This article owes a heavy debt to Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. If you want to see a real master at work, read that.
Achievement A means of distilling the worth of a player down to an arbitrary number, although as with so many other features, someone else found a better way to do the exact same thing. See GearScore.
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Castille World of Warcraft
This Sunday, Dawn Moore has called a temporary truce with Fox Van Allen so the two of them can take Spiritual Guidance on a group trip to Disneyland. They almost made it through the entire Space Mountain line without a fight on what was better, healing or damage. Later, Fox got a stomach ache and dispersed while riding the tea cups, and Dawn had to go back to the hotel to lie down before the Hannah Montana concert.
Once upon a time, an off-tank coughed.
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Kiuperli World of Warcraft
It’s here, finally! The latest items on the 3.3.5 PTR are the quests for Operation: Gnomeregan and Zalazane’s Fall, now playable and perfectly operational. After playing through the Zalazane storyline all I can say is Blizzard really outdid themselves with this one — the lore and chain of quests are not only interesting from beginning to end, but seem to be bug-free. Check out the gallery for screenshots from the entire Zalazane questline, and check after the break for more information on the Zalazane’s Fall chain, but be warned — there are spoilers ahead!
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Catherine World of Warcraft
One of the consequences of the proposed radical changes to rage generation and abilities like Whirlwind and Heroic Strike has been that DPS warriors (especially fury) have been sitting around wondering what their rotation will look like in Cataclysm. So this forum thread is of interest to any warrior who enjoys the fury playstyle. Since we know Whirlwind is going to be an ability you use specifically when AoE is the way to go instead of a free extra DPS on trash ability, and HS isn’t going to be an on next ability, warriors will be left left with a lot of space in their rotation to fill. What will fill it?
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Kins World of Warcraft
Those of you rubbing your hands together in anticipation of Aion’s forthcoming 1.9 patch can now get the jump on the mere mortals who will be stuck downloading the mammoth update on launch day. In a notice posted on the game’s official website, the Aion community team clues us in on the option to download portions of the patch well in advance of the scheduled release (currently Wednesday, June 2).
“You can already prepare for this by pre-loading the patch and have it ready for installation on launch day. Your NCsoft Launcher will now begin to incrementally download the update over the next couple of days leading up to launch,” reads the notice.
You can also get a sneak peak at the 1.9 patch by logging into the Aion Public Test Server.
Castres Aion
Greetings, fellow officers! Welcome to another edition of Captain’s Log, your weekly dispatch from the far reaches of Star Trek Online. I hope everyone had fun tooling around the cosmos with the developers on Monday. Sadly, technical difficulties prevented me from accessing the Tribble test server. So I’m making all my engineers wear red shirts on away missions for the rest of the week — that’ll learn ‘em.
This week, I thought we’d cover one of my favorite aspects of STO: starships! More specifically, I’ll offer some tips and information to help you choose your first ship when you reach that magic Lieutenant 11. Remember, you pretty much have to live with your decision for 10 levels, so let’s make sure you choose wisely.
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Catelet Star Trek Online
New around here? See all our collected tips, tricks and how-to’s for new players in the WoW Rookie Guide.
It ain’t over ’til it’s over — and in World of Warcraft, it ain’t over ’til every player has used the last resurrection cooldown and trick. Death is far from permanent in Azeroth, and over time, the available methods of resurrection (“rezzing”) have multiplied. Some classes can resurrect only outside of combat; one class can rez even in the heat of battle. Some classes have rezzes that work only on themselves. Now that the dungeon finder makes running instance groups so easy for a leveling player, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with all the alternatives for coming back to life. There’s a specific etiquette that’s risen up around rezzes, as well, so take note and don’t get caught looking like a chump.
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Castro World of Warcraft
Blizzard has big plans for gnomes and trolls, with brand new starting areas and questing experiences available for those races when Cataclysm launches. But before that can happen, they need your help! There are some awful baddies that’ve been crashing on their couches, and they’ve been kickin’ around for far too long.
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dreadmage World of Warcraft
Spiritual Guidance is a fickle mistress. By the light of day, it hits the outlet malls with Dawn Moore, gets Oreo McFlurries and has light-hearted discussions about last night’s episode of Glee. By night, though — Wednesday nights in particular — it Shadowcrawls on back to Fox Van Allen for some wild flaying and searing. When you break it down, everyone likes a bad boy.
Fact: According to World of Logs, the top shadow priest DPS on a regular 10-man Lord Marrowgar kill was just over 13,000 DPS. Feel inferior? How about this, then: The top shadow priest DPS on a 25-man heroic Blood-Queen Lana’thel kill is about 27,600. I can’t say for sure whether or not that’s before the 20% buff went live, but when you’re doing over 27k, who cares about that extra 5%?
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Castille World of Warcraft
If you’ve been following World of Warcraft’s published subscriber numbers for a while now, you know that we haven’t seen a rise in WoW subscribers since late 2008. Blizzard’s been holding steady on a figure of 11.5 million subscribers. But, according to Frank Pearce, Blizzard’s Executive Vice President of Product Development, that’s going to change.
Pearce told us that the launch of Cataclysm later this year, as well as the release of Wrath of the Lich King in China, will bring increased numbers to the MMO.
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gmaxwell World of Warcraft
Blizzard poster Turrit announced yesterday that free realm transfers are being made available to address faction imbalance and overpopulation issues on the following PvE realms:
Aggramar (Alliance only)
Area 52 (Horde only)
Blackhand
Hellscream
Stormrage (Alliance only)
Thrall (Horde only)
Undermine
Destination realm:
Drak’thul
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Castro World of Warcraft
Not long ago, a friend of mine from college asked me to resurrect his WoW account so he could get back into the game before Cataclysm comes out. The first week that he was back, he messaged me quite frequently with various questions about trends in raiding and PvP at level 80. I answered his questions without much thought until one afternoon, he sent me a different type of message.
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Kiuperli World of Warcraft
The Icecrown Citadel raid buffs, Hellscream’s Warsong and Strength of Wrynn, just went from 15% to 20% with today’s maintenance. As always, this means a bunch of raid groups will be able to progress a lot farther in Icecrown Citadel, and we’re two thirds of the way to the final 30%. Assuming the schedule remains constant, the last Tuesday in June, the 29th, is when we can expect to see the next 5%.
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Catelet World of Warcraft