World of Warcraft

[Shryke]

What was the market for MMORPGs before WoW came out? Maybe 500,000 subscribers?

What was the market for RTSs before Starcraft?

See, I'm not thiinking of it impinging on the MMO market - I'm thinking of them biting off a piece of the Halo/Modern Warfare market. You can't picture the 4 million people who like FPSs doing so in a MMO-type world where they fight in squad combat and level up that way?

It's the only thing that i"ve come up with so far that wouldn't take drastic chunks out of WoW's existing world population and would expand blizzard into something that they're not currently in. That it also deals with the arena issues is a nice bonus.

I don't know, that market is known for it's love of "The Next Big Thing". They jump around alot.

Also, what about Guild Wars?

[GoN]

We successfully 2 healed (shaman/druid) Blood Princes on 10 man tonight, but what a fight. We had a hunter for our ranged tank, seemed "reasonable" to heal after the pull, as long as people (ie me) had situational awareness to the 15 things you should be looking at in this fight. Fun!

By contrast, I found Blood Queen extremely boring. Spamming chain heal and rejuv seemed a bit of let down after BP. We didn't get her down, ran out of time in tonight's raid. Will go for her Sunday.

[Poobah]

Also, what about Guild Wars?

Fun game :)

[emberling]

Just got Blood Prince Council down (10). Really fun fight. We three-healed, three-tanked it (warlock ranged tank). The damage output is high but we aren't exactly a massively geared group and got it down without a huge amount of difficulty, so I'm not certain it's 'bugged' or what have you, though it might be. It seemed pretty much in line with Festergut/Rotface, a bit more complex but about the same level of gear tuning.

[RaceBannon42]

Got Professor P down in 25. Blood Queen was no where to be found.

[Character Zero]

Got Professor P down in 25. Blood Queen was no where to be found.

Same. :dunno:

[RaceBannon42]

So apparently BQL's despawning isnt even consistent, as she was there for the other top guild on server, and they killed her last night.

Seriously Blizzard? Not like I care that much about server firsts since we dont raid Tuesdays, but it would be nice to at least be on equal footing.

[PhelanArcetus]

Rotface still kicking our asses, but we're doing notably better. At the moment we're primarily facing wipes due to getting overwhelmed by the increased rate of slime spawns as his health dips, so I suspect that either we're doing something entirely wrong, or we're just eating too many little hits from slimes, slime pools, so on, and putting the healers behind.

For me the fight is boring as hell; stand there, smack my regular keys, call out sprays and once in a while move him while dodging an exploding slime. For everyone else, it's much more hectic.

Towards the end, before trash respawns got us to call it for the night and get some alts through Sarth3D, we were trying not cleansing the disease, I believe to keep the number of slimes down. (I know we're having issues where sometimes the slimes aggro the cleanser instead of the diseased person, but we're also having people run the opposite direction from the big ooze, and run back to melee before a merge happens.) Does anyone know if his rate of injecting is based on his health or the number of injections he's already done?

[RaceBannon42]

As far as I know the rate is injections is standard and it speeds up as the fight goes on providing a soft enrage timer, as they eventually overwhelm the raid. Not cleansing isnt going to work aa people are going to take too much damage along with having the MS debuff.

[Kalbear]

The injection is a gradual increase over time - it starts at 12 seconds apart and works its way to about 6 seconds apart 3:30 in. You can choose not to cleanse, but that trades damage dealt for time.

Race, we had to petition a GM to spawn her. I suspect Perdition did the same. Everyone who killed Princes first and then waited through a soft reset faced that. They also hotfixed the encounter so that the vamp buff lasts 60 seconds instead of 50, which means in practice there is no advantage in letting anyone die who has the bite. This also means that the fear she does when she flies into the air can very painfully coincide with a bite cycle, usually the last one.

So you now not only have to manage the bites, you have to make sure that the earlier people wait to bite as long as they can. Ugh.

At least you'll get some attempts on her this week; our guild is done for the week raiding, so we only got 7 attempts as it took 2 1/2 hours to spawn her. And when she did respawn they added that fun hotfix. Stupid blizzard.

[RaceBannon42]

Race, we had to petition a GM to spawn her. I suspect Perdition did the same. Everyone who killed Princes first and then waited through a soft reset faced that. They also hotfixed the encounter so that the vamp buff lasts 60 seconds instead of 50, which means in practice there is no advantage in letting anyone die who has the bite. This also means that the fear she does when she flies into the air can very painfully coincide with a bite cycle, usually the last one.

I did put in a petition. No answer of course. The standard blizzard is experiencing a high volume of petitions at the moment... well no shit. A boss not spawning is a pretty massive fuck up. And thats on top of Emberstorm being down right up until raid time. Seriously they need to just get rid of that whole data center there in Seatle. They have more problems with it, and people get more random lags and DC's from there. Its pretty piss poor service tbh.

[Weak With The Dawn]

Rotface still kicking our asses, but we're doing notably better.

It looks like we had the same exact night in this regard. We got him down to about 38% health. At first our issue was healers dying in slime, by the end of the night it was that we had too many slimes up after an explosion. People were so worried about the explosion that they would ignore what to do about their infection and just kill the whole raid.

The worst thing too is, we either have our Tank who is great at kiting, or our amazing healer. We can't get them on the same night. Our other pally is a great tank but he's not the best kiter, maybe if our DK is on we'll have him do it.

[Angeleyes]

My name is Craig.

I am a WoW Addict. It has been exactly three weeks since I declined to renew my subscription. I have never set foot inside the Plague quarter, and my average iLvl is only 232.

Sometimes I miss it, sometimes I'm just glad I can go to classes without wondering if my Spellweave cooldown is up...

This game is insidious. How long have you all managed to stay sober?

[Durckad]

My name is Jesse.

I am a WoW addict.

I've been clean since mid-November. I read all the posts about ICC and listen to my friends talk about their experiences. Sometimes, I feel like coming back, like maybe I could just play one or two nights a week, but I know better.

I look at the icon on my desktop and I think I should just delete you. But something keeps me from doing that...

[Relic]

This game is insidious. How long have you all managed to stay sober?

8 months since i uninstalled and sold my accounts.

never going back.

[Kalbear]

How many times have you said that, Relic?

[Relic]

How many times have you said that, Relic?

thrice?

[Shryke]

Same group as last week. We managed Rotface tonight, finally.

Don't like that fight, too many ways for 1 person to fuck everything up.

Had 1 shot at Blood Princes, but due to fucking around and little explanation, it didn't go well. And then the raid was called.

And I was only 300 from Revered dammit!! I want my new tanking ring!

[Poobah]

Sadly we wiped up 15 times on BQL 25 this week, so we remain at 7/8 Icecrown encounters down.

In the 10 mans we ran we got most of the achievements though. Missing Dances With Oozes because we kept messing up in the 10man I was in and we got bored so did it the normal way, and didn't get Full House either due to RNG. Still things are looking pretty promising.

I uninstalled recount today. It was using up too much memory and on my shitty laptop that's bad. Also I have a tendency to worry too much about my dps and glancing at the meter makes me a worse player. Since I removed it my mental state in the raids today was considerably more focused.

[PhelanArcetus]

Well, I'm going to have to find a new ICC for my paladin. I had been going to the guild's alt run on Sundays, which ran 5-8. However, to accommodate one of the tanks, that's shifting to 6-9. Which means, since my D&D games start at 8, that I can't attend anymore. Due to travel, D&D was off this weekend (actually, we did it on Friday), so I was able to go to what turned out to be a pretty miserable run. Wiped repeatedly on Marrowgar, didn't kill Deathbringer. On the plus side, I did pick up two pieces of healing plate. On the minus side, that puts my healing offset at a higher average item level than my dps mainspec.

Why did we wipe? Because I was by a large margin the best healer, and I can't heal on the run. Every wipe was a tank dying while everyone tried to get back in position after a bone storm.

Other than that, did a lot of futile hilt farming. The price on that thing isn't dropping and there's absolutely nothing I can do aside from persist, which is frustrating. At least most types of farming, you're making slow progress, not just banging your head at a rare drop.

And given the way this day has started, I strongly suspect I'm not going to be in the mood to deal with that idiot paladin tank in the Monday 25-man run.