With all the preliminary work laid out, this week we’ll be finally be getting started on the actual leveling aspect of my multi-part leveling guide. This week we’ll be covering abilities, rotations, talent builds, and gear upgrades for the first 40 levels of the priest class. So if you dream of smiting your enemies with divine fire, and giving yourself a small tan in the process, hit the jump!
Before I get started, I want to provide a few disclaimers that should be considered while using this guide. This is not a speed leveling guide. It will not tell you what quests to do, what zones to go to, nor will it attempt to calculate the most effective way to level as a priest. Frankly, unless you’re being power leveled by a higher level character, I don’t believe that one method of leveling is superior to another. My own personal experience tells me that, in terms of experience per hour, using the random dungeon finder is abysmal in comparison to questing. Yet I have had many people tell me their experience is the opposite, and they find RDF faster than questing. Who’s right? It doesn’t matter. Whatever holds your attention is what you should do. This guide will try to accommodate that.
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Well, even if you’re a raiding player clearing heroic mode ICC 25 there will be some really tempting items for you as you level from 80 to 85 in Cataclysm. Items like this Obsidian Executioner, usable at level 81, will certainly be of interest to your 2h melee DPS, while the Decapitator’s Razor will draw attention from enhancement shamans, rogues, and perhaps even death knights and fury warriors with the new Single-Minded Fury talent.
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Back in May, we kicked around the idea of reversing gears after our series on “The 25 most evil achievements,” and today I’d like to start the first in our series on … well, I had trouble naming it. “Most fun achievements” is a bit awkward. “Best achievements?” Probably too vague, especially because we could all spend hours arguing over what constitutes a truly good achievement. “Least evil?” That doesn’t do much to inspire readers. Finally I settled on “most entertaining achievements,” and I hope that’s a decent gloss on the series that will follow.
Today we’ll examine the first five, with more to follow next week. In a nutshell, I think these are the achievements that every WoW players should do, if only because they showcase some of Blizzard’s best, most engaging or funniest work.
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It looks like the long wait may be over, as US servers appear to be slowly coming back online from a lengthy extended maintenance. For now the list of servers up is small, and there’s been no official confirmation from Blizzard as to whether or not the downtime is over — however most servers that are up and live are experiencing queues in the thousands and are locked from further character creation at this time. We’ll update this post when the servers are officially back up and running — until then, why not check out the Tuesday Morning Post for reading material you may have missed?
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Remember how NCsoft said prior to the 1.9 patch that there wouldn’t be any more of their patented Aion double XP weekends for awhile? Well forget all that as this Friday, June 11th, marks the beginning of yet another scrumptious smorgasbord of sweet, sweet experience for your level-hungry Daevas.
We’re not sure what changed their minds (and frankly we don’t care as long as the spice keeps flowing), but one thing we are sure of is that the event has caused us to rethink our weekend gaming plans. When combined with the hefty repeatable quest XP rewards littering the landscape around Heiron post-patch, we’d be remiss for not scarfing up as much as humanly possible. We might even, gasp, approach max level.
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We’re just coming off of a holiday weekend here in the US, and Japan had their own recent stretch of holidays, so news on Final Fantasy XIV has been a little bit slower of late. But a recent group of interviews in the June 11th issue of Dengeki have been translated thanks to the team over at FFXIVCore, and they cover topics from materials of armor to the game’s not-always-praised battle system. The first part of the interview talks testing and systems with Hiromichi Tanaka and Nobuai Komoto, while the second part discusses visuals and worldbuilding with planner Kenichi Iwao.
We confirm that the next phase of testing is set to begin soon, as well as dropping the news that the next test will likely feature an almost totally redesigned battle system. It’s even hinted that players were never meant to experience the current system, that it was there almost as a placeholder. By contrast, Iwao discusses the lore and visual aspects of the game, talking about how items will be made from different materials, and how players who want to play a male Mito’qe shouldn’t give up hope just yet. All Final Fantasy XIV fans are encouraged to read both interviews, since there’s a lot of information available in both — just the thing for the post-holiday doldrums.
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Aion’s 1.9 patch has gotten a lot of press recently, and rightfully so, given the game-changing updates it brings to the table. With the big day officially scheduled for tomorrow, June 2nd, the community team has updated the official site with word on the expected server downtime, which currently stands at eight hours.
The servers will go dark at 4:30am PDT at the start of the process, which works out to an estimated 1.9 launch time of 12:30pm PDT tomorrow. Check out the announcement over at the official site, as well as the patch notes. While you’re at it, have a gander at some of our 1.9 coverage to get up to speed on the forthcoming changes.
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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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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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When news starts coming from Famitsu regarding Final Fantasy XIV, it usually heralds information coming direct from Square-Enix shortly thereafter. Only a short time after the leak that gave us a look at the world map and some of the points of interest, the official site updated with more information on the world. While there was some information accessible from the prior scans, the new section on Limsa Lominsa details the city extensively, as well as adding sections for the two other city states, Ul’dah and Gridania.
Although the three states each bear some similarities to Final Fantasy XI’s great nations, they’re quite different in feel and in scope. The biggest similarity seems to be that much like the previous game, they’re filled with distinct personalities and locations. Limsa Lominsa is the only city to get full detailing on its landmarks, but those range from the former pirate dive that’s been turned into the adventurer’s guild (The Drowning Wench) to the city’s center at an ancient swamped battleship (The Mizzenmast). Final Fantasy XIV fans are encouraged to take a look at the official site for its updates, which continue to paint the world of Eorzea in broad strokes.
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Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Electric word, life. It means forever and that’s a mighty long time. But I’m here to tell you — there’s something else. The World of Warcraft. A world of never-ending gnome corpses. You can always see the shadows, day or night. So when you call up that Spiritual Guidance columnist in Beverly Hills — you know the one, Dr. Fox Van Allen — instead of asking him how much of your time is left, ask him how much of your mind, baby. Cause he’s going to flay it into effing oblivion every Wednesday.
Ladies and gentlemen, my first car ever was my grandmother’s old 1986 Ford Taurus. It had a digital speedometer and a pretty kicking tape deck. I even got the sample cassette tape that came with the car. I spent some of the best years of my life cruising the Garden State while listening to Neil Diamond’s Heartlight and the theme to Cats. (Before you judge, most of you were listening to Sugar Ray and the theme to Friends instead at the time.)
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If you are the leader of a guild that has a large number of people who have account security issues, you regularly get emails from Blizzard that say the following:
Recently one of the members of your guild was the victim of an account compromise, and during the course of our investigation it was discovered that items were removed from the guild bank while the account was out of the control of your guild member. The items have been returned to you as attachments to an in-game mail. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
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Posters on MMO-Champion’s boards have gotten into the Cataclysm alpha and started datamining female worgen models and animations. While the models don’t have textures yet (i.e. you’re only going to see a bunch of black and not their faces or anything) and some of the animations are placeholders borrowed from existing models (mostly female draenei), this is the first look we’re getting at one of Cataclysm’s most hotly anticipated features.
WARNING: This post is stuffed full of spoilers. It is a spoiled piece of concentrated awesome wrapped in spoiled paper boxed and shipped to Spoilertopia courtesy of Spoiler Express. Don’t click below if you don’t want anything to do with unofficial information.
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I love numbers. I love facts and statistics, I love looking through them and speculating on the different possible interpretations. As we move into the end of Wrath, I thought it would be a nice time to take a look at everybody’s favorite number, DPS, and see how each spec is doing in ICC.
But rather than just looking at the top DPS of each spec, I thought it would be more interesting to see where the average DPS for each spec is, across all gear levels, all skill levels — to get a glimpse of how the average raider is doing. While we don’t have access to the DPS of every raider out there, we do have something close, and that something is World of Logs.
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The past couple of months have not been kind to Mythic Entertainment, with an uncomfortable double-header of a huge billing fiasco followed by the closure of the Mythic Store. The billing especially produced a great deal of outrage from players, understandably concerned about their account security as well as the potential impact on their bank accounts. Even reversing the charges didn’t leave everyone completely mollified — but Mythic has put in the effort to try and not just apologize and reverse the error, but help regain the trust and goodwill of the players.
Both Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot players will receive two items of their choice on all current and future characters, with Warhammer Online mailing out tokens and Dark Age of Camelot simply allowing you to talk to a Royal Accountant. The items include dyes, decorations, temporary disguises, and other fun toys for players to help recover from the aftershocks. On the off chance that you didn’t receive the items and were billed multiple times, the team at Mythic has a specific appeals process to ensure correct delivery. As bad as the error was, it’s good to see that players will be compensated nicely for as long as they keep playing.
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