Bonemaw Workaround (Shadowmoon Burial Grounds Heroic)

I just finished running Shadowmoon Burial Grounds on Heroic difficulty. I'm not going to write a full guide to each dungeon, because frankly better people than I have already done so, but we did figure something out that works quite well against this boss.

Bonemaw during the Inhale phase

A quick overview of Bonemaw:

He basically has two mechanics that you need to worry about. The first is Body Slam, which will do some damage and knock players off into the water. The second is an Inhale ability, which will suck players into his mouth and cause an instant death. I've been told you can run away from it if you have a burst of speed like ability, but the in-game mechanic designed to work around it is to stand in the patches of Necrotic Pitch that Bonemaw shoots on the ground.

The pitch acts like a glue and, although doing some decent damage, will not allow you to be sucked in during inhale.

The simple start is to avoid the ground slam and then stand in the pitch when he begins his inhale.

However a rogue in my guild found a good workaround for this.

If you happen to be too far away from the pitch when the inhale phase starts, just jump down into the water. Swim to the water spouts that are conveniently placed around the boss zone. Once inhale is done swim to the waterspout and you'll be pushed back into the boss zone.

Water Spout

The downside of this is obviously you're not doing any damage to the boss during the inhale phase, but you're also not taking any damage, which might help you healer out a bit.

If you want a full strategy guide to Bonemaw & Shadowmoon Burial Grounds, please visit the excellent guide over at WoWhead.

Shadowmoon Burial Grounds Guide

Bonemaw's Loot Table

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Changes

With the coming of Warlords of Draenor, as well as some changes going on in my World of Warcraft guild and my Dungeons & Dragons group, I've decided to change some things around. Previously I ran two separate websites, one blog that was about gaming in general, and another blog that was specifically geared toward hunter pets. I have since migrated all of my hunter pet pals over to the Insanitarium, as well as the other posts about general gaming.

Starting forward this blog will be about all of my gaming, technology, and general nerd culture writings and rantings. I've also updated the website layout, and will be changing a few things aesthetically to the blog. The only real difference is that I'll be adding more content, and I will be adding easier ways to find the specific content that any reader so I may, or may not, have will want to find. 

If I have amy regular readers, then I hope this change will help simplify things. It certainly is going to simplify things for me, because now only have one blog the post two rather than three.

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Ziri'ak

Almost everyone in my guild, when they reached the Spires of Arak, chose the Brewery Garrison Outpost, which rewards (among other things) a passive 20% increase to XP while in the zone. Pretty good deal, right?

Well, maybe not. After a bit of research I chose the Trading Post building, which allows you to summon an NPC called "Honest Jim" every 10 minutes while in the Spires of Arak. What's so good about Honest Jim you might ask? Well, in addition to some nice potions and other consumables (a 28 slot bag for 2200 gold), Honest Jim will sell an item called Inactive Apexis Guardian, which allows you to add a follower named Ziri'ak to your garrison.

Ziri'ak is an Apexis Guardian, and the reason why I'm glad I got him is because he comes to your garrison as level 99. You are eligible to enter the Spires of Arak at level 96, so that means you'll have a high level follower for your garrison.

There are benefits (and some hindrances) to this. First, it means that you have 1 heavy handed follower to send on some missions, thereby slightly increasing the success rate. However, adding this guy to your garrison opens up level 99 missions, meaning you have fewer missions to choose from where you'll have a 100% success rate. That being said, I didn't notice myself failing too many missions after I added this follower to my garrison.

I think that most players probably chose the 20% XP boost, and to be honest I'll probably be choosing that option for all of my alts. However, since I was leveling up my main first I wanted to give myself what would hopefully be a long term boost with an extra Garrison follower. 

So far I'm happy with the selection. As you can imagine he was my first follower to reach level 100, I'm actually a little annoyed that he reached level 100 before I did,

I haven't leveled my Garrison enough to get any other noticeable benefit from having this fall around, but it is nice to have an extra follower. I highly recommend that everybody choose this option for your main account, when you reach the Spires of Arak. 

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WoW's 10th Anniversary

It's that time of year again, time for us all to gather around and be thankful for everything we have. Especially World of Warcraft.

10 years ago I was playing Warcraft III, and still tinkering around with StarCraft and Diablo II, when Blizzard announced that they were going into MMO business.

I played a little bit of EverQuest, and didn't really enjoy it that much. And I certainly didn't like the idea of paying a monthly subscription just to play a game that I already own. I mean if I wanted to play an RPG I could just log on to Diablo. (Yes I know Diablo isn't a true RPG, but I still had Baldur's Gate II to play around with at the time - which on a side note, man wasn't that just a great game?)

But I've been a Blizzard fan since I was in... oh I don't know about eighth-grade, so I signed up for the beta. And then I got into the open beta. And by that point I was hooked.

Ten years later and World of Warcraft is still going strong. Warlords of Draenor is looking to be the best expansion the game has had in years, and to celebrate the 10th years of the game Blizzard is having the biggest anniversary party ever.

In years past players have gotten a free pet for logging in during the anniversary, or an XP boost, which was nice, but nothing on the level that Blizzard has released for this anniversary.

1 - Molten Core

First off we have the return of Molten Core. I'm going to write a post specifically about Molten Core in a little bit, but let's just say that this was the first 40 man raid ever, in the history of World of Warcraft. This was where all of the Tier 1 dungeon pieces dropped; this was where players got their first taste of what raiding would be. I'm extremely excited to run the 40-man Molten Core raid, especially because I never raided in Vanilla. Yep that's right, although I love raiding now I didn't really start raiding until BC; during Vanilla I was mostly a PVP Hunter, and not a particularly good one. And I don't even play my hunter anymore…

Molten Core is a massive cavern where players face Core Hounds, giant Fire Elementals, some big Naga dudes and... oh yeah, Ragnaros. Raggy's basically a giant Balroc and well... you see the picture above.

The raid itself is mainly for nostalgia, although it does drop a few good items as you can see below. 

2 - Tarren Mill vs Southshore

The next thing that blizzard is announcing is Tarran Mill vs Southshore. Now that is something into which I can sink my teeth because, I actually did run Tarren Mill vs Southshore. A lot. Especially back in the days where hunters had one of the best AOE spells in the game, it was a lot of fun.

The BG itself is currently a bit hard on melee - it's basically a team death match that typically devolves to ranged vs ranged as any melee that run toward the enemy team get killed in about 2 seconds. Which is a shame as I play a Paladin right now but... it's still fun. 

3 - Molten Corgi

Of course, there's the free in game pet that everybody gets, the Molten Corgi which coincides with Molten Core. There's nothing particularly awesome about getting a battle pet for an anniversary, we've seen it before, but man the Molten Corgi does look awesome. 

4 - Core Hound Mount

Core Hounds are some of the coolest looking creatures in World of Warcraft. I mean, it's a gigantic rock monster that's a dog with two heads and it breathes fire. When Wrath of the Lich King was released BM hunters were able to tame them, I practically lost my mind. But now we get to ride them as mounts. Which is totally freaking awesome.

5 - 640 Helm

There is actually one more thing I forgot to mention, Which is the really cool looking helmet that you get for killing Ragnaros in Molten Core. It's a 640 item level piece, which is currently the highest item level headset you can get for PvE, and other than the item level 680 Ring, is the highest in game until Highmual opens up and starts dropping better gear. And plus, it looks amazing. It's basically A halo made of fire. I'm definitely going to be changing my transmog when I get that piece.

Both the Corehound mount and the helm only drop from Ragnaros, so you have to sit through the entire LFR in order to complete it.

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Blizzard apologizes for worst launch ever - and it is totally acceptable

About ten hours ago, J. Allen Brack, Executive Producer of World of Warcraft, posted a rather long thread on the WoW forums, which you can read here. In it he explains the issues that were involved in the launch, and how the WoW team worked to fix those issues. I won't go into detail here, and he doesn't express all of my concerns, but in the whole I'm satisfied.

He also explained that Blizzard is giving everyone 5 days of free game time. This is to off set the 3 or so days when it was practically impossible to log into the game for many players, myself included.

Already there are some QQ posts on the forums, but most of what I've read has been positive.

I personally am totally satisfied with Blizzard's response. The game was pretty much un-playable for me for the first three days, and it was not until Saturday morning that I was even able to start leveling. It's now Tuesday night and I've just dinged 99... but if I'd been able to play those first three days I would be well into grinding heroics by now.

Having lost three days of game time, Blizzard has given me 5 days in compensation. I call this a win/win. Of course Blizzard did drop the ball on a few areas, but coupled with a massive DDoS attack I think that Blizzard has weathered the storm well and has responded in a satisfactory way.

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World of Waitcraft: The most anticipated disaster of the year.

Now don't let the title fool you - I love Warlords of Draenor. I love it far more than the tolerable Mists of Pandaria, more than my apathy allowed for Cataclysm, and I even like it more than Wrath of the Lich King, which up until this point was the last expansion that I pined for.

So let me be clear that I love Warlords of Draenor so far - when I'm able to play it.

But that's the real problem with WoD right now: you can't play. Let me take you back about half a week. Midnight on Thursday, November 13. I'm sitting in game, listening to my guild in vent, and getting ready for the launch. Then suddenly it happens: WoD is now live. I recieved a quest telling me to talk to Khadgar right at the Dark Portal. Enter problem 1: The Bottleneck. 

This might not be much of an issue in a few months when most of the regular players will have reached 100, but during the midnight launch it was a disaster. Without giving away too many spoilers, the quest line at the beginning of WoD is linear: players cannot skip parts of the quest line until about 15 quests in - basically until you found your garrison. This means that the server is literally clogged with hundreds of players standing on top of the quest giver, ninjaing quest items and lagging up the entire server so that it crashes almost continuously.

This leads to my second complaint- The server cap. Blizzard lowered the maximum server cap drastically in order to not overwhelm their hardware (also possibly in response to a massive DDoS attack) which means that during peak hours almost all servers are locked. As you can see above, this results in massive wait times to even log in (6 hours is my personal record, but some guild mates waited almost 10 hours). If you combine these factors, added with the fact that the servers were constantly crashing most of Thursday and even for a good chunk of Friday, it made the game pretty unplayable.

Now of course I need to add that when I was able to play the game it was fantastic. Once you get out of the overpopulated starting zone, and progress toward your Garrison, the game becomes far less laggy. Blizzard will probably increase the server cap over the next few weeks until it gets back to its normal maximum, and at that point there shouldn't be much of an issue with logging in. I'm on the Kel'Thuzad the server, which is one of the most populated alliance servers, and up until today I haven't really had to sit in the queue in order to log in it. Last time I really had to wait to login was during the heydays of the Burning Crusade, back when wow was able to boast a good 11 million subscribers, rather than the 8 million that has now.

I am going to be writing a more detailed review of the game a little later. This post is mostly just an opportunity for me to vent about how terrible the rollout was. Really, really terrible, worse than Mists of Pandaria was. For those of you who played MoP, the opening quest line was unplayable. It's actually still pretty unplayable, from my own personal opinion, but at least you don't have to deal with about 500 other players on their gyrocopters trying to blow up the one barrel on one ship all at the same time.

In summation, here's a bullet point list of what is, and what isn't, Blizzard's fault relating to this disaster of a release.

What IS Blizzard's fault:

• Linear, obligatory quest progression
• Single zone bottleneck
• Reducing the server cap
• Tapped, single spawn quest items
• Various bugs (including the infamous character not found bug, hearthstones randomly hear thing you home and then locking you out of WoD, etc...)

What ISN'T Blizzard's fault:

• The massive DDoS attack

Basically, Blizzard got hit by a massive DDoS attack and weathered it as best as it could, but any attempt (as some have tried) to shift all of the blame on the launch of WoD onto the DDoS attack is facile at best. 

Joystiq has an excellent article on this subject that goes into far more detail than I care to. In short, I love the game, and I'm sure I will continue to love it if I can ever actually get in game. 

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