A couple of months ago, Vok wrote a post entitled “Gearscore, How I Hate Thee“.  Since that time, it’s gotten worse.  Much worse.  It seems like everyone is running GearScore nowadays, or knows what their GearScore is.  You can’t walk 10 metres in Dalaran at the moment without hearing calls of either “LFM, min GS 5000″ or “Tank GS 5319 selling heroics runs”.

Things came to a head in guild yesterday, when some guildies were organising an ICC 10 run.  I joined the raid and we were stuck at 9 people – the call of “LF Tank ICC10″ went out in guild.  A couple of minutes later, a guildie responded – “I can tank, but my gearscore is only 4681″.  ”Nah, you need 5k for ICC, sorry” was the answer from a raid member.

Myself and a few other guildies challenged – “This guild doesn’t use gearscore, and he’s close to what you want anyway, give him a chance”.  It turned into a huge argument – the gearscore adherents stating that “for a tank, gear is more important than skill”, and the gearscore haters pointing out that we’d rather take a guildie than a pug, and that gearscore is fundamentally flawed.  Eventually Guild Master Vok logged on to stop the argument, and the raid broke up due to lack of tank and frayed tempers.   Read the rest of this entry »

Lore and Order (WoW)

The world is at war and no matter how some may try to escape, ultimately everyone must fight. Gilneas tried to escape the wars that have ravaged Azeroth, however the time comes when they must rejoin the Alliance, or face destruction. The Human Kingdom of Gilneas lies to the south of Silverpine Forest, ruled by the Greymane Dynasty. At the time of the Second War, Gilneas was once of the mightiest kingdoms on Azeroth, a wealth of resources and men.

The Greymane Wall

During the Second War, Lord Genn Greymane argued endlessly against the Alliance. Gilneas was a mighty kingdom and had no need of an Alliance with weaker nations to hold off the Horde. Greymane was fearful his kingdoms resources would be squandered by lesser nations.

Beset by the Horde, though, Gilneas did join the Alliance, although its contribution was token at best. Many speculate that Greymane’s reluctance can be traced back to the influence of Daval Prestor – now known to be Deathwing in his human form. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a post written for guildies from our own Barramundi, on our forums. I (Nasi) have given it a little bit of editing and will be posting it in three parts. Part 1 is Stats and What They Mean. Part 2 is the Pull and the Fight. Part 3 is the Macro’s and the Summary. Props to Barra for his great work and a big thanks for sharing his knowledge and experience.

Protection Warrior stuff! Let me start by saying that the tanking gear itemisation in Wotlk for warriors is bollocks – I would like to see more block rating gear! I understand that this is to accommodate for Death Knights, but there is way too much dodge/parry gear around, and it’s of little surprise that this lead to the ICC debuff of -20% dodge rating with people stacking dodge. Dodge/parry gear is great, but you’re going to scare the jeepers out of your healers when you do get hit (spike damage). Block rating gear is great, because you do take constant damage, but mitigate fair chunk of it (with raid buffs Barra blocks up to ~8k per block), and your healers can stay awake rather than switching off for 5s because you hadn’t taken any damage, it sort of creates predictable healing if you will. Anyway, that’s my 2 cents for starters! Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d throw a little guide for new Shaman healers together, mainly for use by a few Shaman in guild, but I find myself wondering how to start. I count myself as a reasonably accomplished healer, but doing and explaining are two different things. How do you distil everything you know from reading countless EJ threads, Resto Shaman blogs, forums posts and a couple of years experience? How do you explain that you just know what to cast and when to cast it?

Start at the start I guess. This is my little guide to how I heal – Part One. It may not be the right way according to many a Shaman, but it works for me. These thoughts of mine generally refer to 10-man raiding.

It’s important to know where Shaman fit with the other healers. Paladins tank heal. (Holy) Priests raid heal. Druids heal everyone. Shaman no longer have a clearly defined role and are close to the most versatile healers in the game. TBC we were horrible tank healers but with a few changes we’ve come a long way in that department (not quite as solid as Paladins, but the gap is closing). TBC we were the raid healer of choice, now a number of other classes are closing in on us and we do it differently than we once did, it’s no longer just Chain Heal spam (although it’s kind nice when you can). Read the rest of this entry »

Some stories and worlds just scream MMO, although a great IP (Intellectual property) does not always translate into a great MMO (I’m looking at you Matrix Online and Warhammer Online), but it certainly helps. The excitement over patch 3.3 in World of Warcraft is an excellent example of an existing IP creating energy in the MMO environment. The initial success of Warhammer Online can certainly be attributed to the fans of the existing IP, and the drop off shows what happens when that IP is not capitalised on.

This blog isn’t about the success or failure of MMO’s and there adaptation of an existing IP though. This blog is a “how cool would it be” blog. What IP’s need to be made into an MMO and need to be made into an MMO now!

Warhammer 40k – Ok, so this one is in development, and so it should be. A brutal and dark universe, with so many great character and stories, the Warhammer 40K universe is perfect for an MMO. Space Marines and Eldar, Necrons and Chaos, so many possible classes and storylines in one of the darkest and grittiest settings available. Warhammer 40k needs to be an MMO – one of a higher standard than Warhammer too! Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the big day is here and I hope everyone is having a great Christmas. I love this time of year myself – although this is the first in a long time with young children at my place, not sure about the 630 wake up.

The blog will be pretty sporadic over the next week or so. Blogs will still be going up, but periodically and there is a fair chance I’ll have a few beers in me when I write a couple, so we’ll see how we go. Plus, the Boxing Day test will be soaking up a fair bit of my time too.

So, the team at Unreal Realities wishes everyone an Unreal Christmas. We hope you get to spend some time with your loved ones, be it in person, on the phone, over your social networking tool of choice or in an MMO! Stay safe and be merry!

Now for a few personal thank you guys. Maiketh, Star and Reas, your help on the blog, the forums and with the guild is invaluable. I cannot thank you enough but I do hope to repay the debt at some time. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr Nasi has unfortunately fallen afoul of the Wrath of the Broken Video Card, so I thought I’d take his place to discuss the recent exploits of the Pirates.

As per Serevok’s previous post, with the “tuning” done to Lord Marrowgar, the first wing of ICC is now not particularly challenging, so last night when we were smashing it down (old school style), we decided to give the I’m On A Boat achievement a shot.     Read the rest of this entry »

Mimiron was one of my favorite encounters in Ulduar. It was certainly one of the most complex, with three completely different phases to the fight before coming together for the final phase. That was nothing compared to Firefighter though.

Firefighter is the hard mode for Mimiron and hard is the word. Activated by simply pressing a button behind Mimiron, the self destruct button no less, it upped the difficulty significantly. Whilw there was a health boost to Mimiron, the real kicker was the fire. It appeared everywhere.

I’m not going to go through the details of the encounter – with three vastly different Phases, before a final phase combining the other three, now with added fire, water bombs/robots – because that would be a massive blog in it’s own right. If you do not know the mechanics of the fight you can have a read here or watch this lovely video someone else prepared earlier.

Our strategy was nothing special. We kited the fire anti-clockwise in phase one, using each third of the room in turn. It worked well, although occasionally someone would stand in the one spot for a touch long and get a little toasty from the fires. Healing our tank through the Plasma Blast was tricky but certainly not overly stressful – although more than one wipe occurred because one of us wasn’t paying quiet enough attention at one time or another. Read the rest of this entry »

So, I’ve finally finished with Crazy town (and by that I mean work) for the year *yipee* and like most of us, I will have very little time to catch up on all those in game plans.  Well not plans so much as just bulk game time!  I shouldn’t complain really, in this instance I’m more than happy to trade it for a few weeks of playing Santa and Aunty.  Ask me at the end of two weeks and I’ll probably give you a different answer but for now, its only two sleeps to go!

This week, I’ve continued my neglect of my Rune Priest in LotRO.  He’s stalled at level 26.  Both my games of choice have had some pretty big events of late, with LotRO and WoW both having fairly large expansions/patches in the last few weeks and both have brought some fantastic changes to the game.  So far though, WoW is ‘winning’.  While the patch has provided excellent value, improvement and expansion to the raiding experience, Unreal Realities the guild has given me a whole new lease on playing the game.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I tend to ’solo’ a lot and I consider myself to be the ‘casual player’ category – which I think that both games are now catering to very well.  While at times I’d love to play with the big kids, at this point in time I’m just not in for the time investment required.  I thoroughly enjoy the flexibility to be able to (try at least) play two MMOs and as many characters as possible.  Which brings me back on track.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about heading back over to LotRO lately, but after a few minutes of hovering between the two icons, I find myself greeting the frosty dragon and entering that authenticator code. Read the rest of this entry »

• … hardmode. This is the first time that we have seen “Heroic” and “Hardmode” encounters, much to the pleasure of some and angst of others. In Blizzard’s attempt to create more accessible content and accommodate players new to the game, they have made loot much easier to obtain and boss kills easier to achieve, meaning that whilst inexperienced players could see the new content, experienced players may find the content trivial. As a means of of balancing this out so that the content was still interesting and challenging, they introduced “Hard” and “Heroic” modes, which added a higher gear requirement, degree of difficulty and more complication to the fights, whilst allowing these harder fights to drop better gear, so that there was still a reward for effort.

• … badges. Whilst it isn’t the first time that we have seen badges, it is the first time that we’ve seen tier gear that you could purchase with badges, instead of raid token drops. Badges really offer an incredible range and assortment of gear, giving you something of raid quality to put in every slot now, not to mention the craftable items!  t has a flow on effect of making heroic dungeons more popular and, given some good groups (or a good group of friends), it is entirely possible to be completely Tier 9 within a couple of days! Read the rest of this entry »