In the News: Shadowmourne, Legendary 2h Axe

For those of you haven't been keeping up with MMO-Champion and the spoilers for the next patch, here's what you need to know about the next legendary weapon: Shadowmourne, a 2h axe for Ret Pallies, Fury/Arms Warriors, and DKs of every spec.

How to obtain Shadowmourne

Step 1: Reach 'friendly' status with the Ashen Verdict, the new reputation faction in ICC. From this point you can obtain the quest "The Sacred and the Corrupt", in which you will be tasked with the following:

*Obtain Light's Justice, Arthas' old warhammer, from the Frostmourne cavern in Dragonblight (bring friends. Although I'm not sure of the details, I know you do meet with resistance.)

*Combine Light's Justice with 25 (!) Primordial Saronite (the new crafting reagent in ICC, dropping from bosses and trash at random. They can also be purchased with 23 Emblems of Frost a piece.) and a quest item from 2 bosses in ICC: Rotface and Festergut (only on 25-man).

The reward for getting that far into the questline is Shadow's Edge, a beast of a weapon in it's own right. Shadow's Edge will eventually upgrade into Shadowmourne.

Step 2: Obtain Quest items from Professor Putricide, Queen Lana'thel, and Sindragosa (only on 25-man and in that order, this step represents three seperate quests). These 3 bosses are 'end bosses' for their wings. Even in normal mode, they have a limited number of attempts available for the raid before they despawn. On top of this, getting the quest items from each requires special steps to be taken during the boss fights.

Step 3: Obtain 60 Fragments of the Frozen Throne. These fragments, much like the fragment's of Valan'yr and other legendaries before it, are held by bosses in (25-player only) ICC. It is, however, unknown whether they will be lootable by only one person, like previous legendaries, or will be obtainable by anyone with the quest, as the item is listed as a 'quest item'. This can only be completed on 25-man.

An interesting note: unlike the shards associated with previous legendaries, these quest items are Epic in quality and not Legendary, lending credibility to the idea that they will, in fact, be sure-fire drops for anyone with the quest.

Step 4: Slay 1000 (yes, one thousand) of the Lich King's servants (trash and bosses) with Shadow's Edge. This can be completed on 10 and 25 player.

The 5th step is currently un-released on the PTR, but will involve killing Arthas, to be sure. After completing all these steps, the player is rewarded with Shadowmourne, which replaces Shadow's Edge.

This is a remarkably different step in regards to legendaries, and I hope it proves to be the same for the future. Blizzard's goal with Shadowmourne was to eliminate a lot of the RNG problems that were encountered with Vala'nyr and other legendaries, and instead add a very epic questline packed with lore.

Many are assuming that the Shards of the Frozen Throne will be treated like a normal quest item, and anyone on the questline will be able to obtain them. It's also assumed, a little less commonly, that the shards will be guaranteed drops off those bosses (or perhaps guaranteed in hard mode and random in reg). This is due A) to the sheer amount of shards needed to complete the weapon (Vala'nyr was, I believe, 40?) and B) Blizzard's stated intent to eliminate RNG issues with legendaries.

Thanks to Boubouille at mmo-champion, where most of this information was discovered. And good luck to everyone vying for this axe come the release of 3.3

Guide to being a better tank: Part 2

Part 2: Communication

First things first: get Ventrilo. Too many people I’ve run with recently don’t use it. (these are usually the same type of people who base everything solely on gearscore, which is dangerous.) Vent is a must for most raiding, in fact, I still use it on most ‘easy’ T7 raids.
The role of tank naturally tends toward leadership. In fact, this section could be titled ‘leadership’ instead of ‘communication’. Tanks are in a prime role to guide the raid through to victory. If you aren’t comfortable with stepping up and taking leadership, you probably won’t ever be considered a stellar tank. Tanks often are aware, or at least should be, of what is going on the raid at all times (see lesson #1, awareness), and are therefore in the best position to identify why a wipe happened, and communicate to the raid what needs to change to avoid that in future attempts. Learn to recognize these things and communicate them concisely with the team, offering solutions to whatever problems that may have arisen.
Communication with DPS is of course important (when to back off and give you time to get a better threat advantage, or when to push DPS as you have a large threat lead, etc.), but by far the bulk of your communication during the raid will be (or should be) with your healers. Healers need to know what you need to stay alive, and when. This largely comes down to healing assignments, making sure you have a wide enough variety of healers to deal with the situation (need more HoTs? Grab a druid, etc.)
It’s also imperative let your healers know when you’re going to use any of your defensive cooldowns, preferably before you use them. (I won’t be covering the basics of using your cooldowns, as that is information I’m assuming you know.) Announcing when you’re going to use your cooldowns due to excessive incoming damage allows your healers to be prepared to handle the situation accordingly, keeping you alive. Building, again, on our first lesson of awareness, when you see the raid start to take too much damage, you can pop a cooldown and advise one or more of your healers to focus on the raid. This is also applicable when one of your healers is low on mana and needs a bit of a regen break.
Communication during the fight is imperative, but the most important time to communicate is before the fight. Before the pull your team needs to know what to expect, and more than just positioning. The raid needs to know at what percent to pop heroism/offensive cooldowns, at what points in the fight you plan on using your defensive cooldowns, what spells need to be kicked and who needs to be doing the kicking, where to stand, where and when to move to, healing assignments, DPS priorities on fights with multiple targets, and any other information that may be special to that raid (dealing with the constructs on Ignis, for example).
It should go without saying, but all of the above is useless is you, as the tank, don’t know the fight. Use the resources at your disposal to make sure your knowledge of the fight is such that you can tell anyone in the raid what their job is. Especially in PUG situations, you may just end up having to explain bits of the fight to members of your raid.
A raid with a well-organized strategy is much more likely to succeed, especially in PUGs where the members aren’t used to each-other’s methods, but here’s the kicker: Your job isn’t just to communicate this information concisely, it needs to be done quickly as well. This is especially true when considering wipe-recovery. The more downtime pre-pull, the more likely it is that your raid will lose interest.
So there you have it, lesson number two of my guide to become a better tank. All information contained here is of course, my own opinion, and very likely incomplete, but hopefully it helps some of you out there.

3.2.2, 3.3, and 4.0: The future of World of Warcraft

So, I'm going to assume I'm still talking to an empty room, but that's how these things get started eh? So I'll keep trucking along, mostly because... well, to be honest, I am just that bored.

With Blizzcon this week, there's a lot of talk about the future of WoW. 3.2.2 is going to hit Live servers sometime in November, and we'll be face to face with our old friend Onyxia again (feral druids and deathknight tanks should take note: the new version of Thunderstrike/Shadowstrikc is a beast of a polearm, and the only (unless I'm grossly overlooking something) 2-handed weapon with any kind of tanking stat on it. More on that in a future post.).

3.3 will follow afterwards, where we will reach the culimination of the expansion and come face-to-face with it's namesake: Arthas, the Lich King. Some info was given at Blizzcon about Icecrown Citadel, and it sounds awesome. The raid instance will take up 4 floors of the citadel and wil be comprised of 12 bosses, including Sindragosa (queen of the frost wyrms), The Lich King himself, and a very interesting sounding encounter involving boarding the opposing faction's airship from your own faction's ship. Also in the Icecrown raid will be a legendary axe, Shadowmourne, available for Hunters and Deathknights. The surprising news on Icecrown Citadel is that it will include not one, not even 2, but 3 (!) 5-man dungeons that will be linked together through an Epic questline and feature 8 bosses, whom you will face with the help of some of your faction's Heroes (King Varian Wrynn for thelliance and Saurfang Sr. for the Horde) Also among the interesting news about the 3.3 patch is that it will feature a new cross-realm LFG system that will actually provide rewards for PUGging. More info on this as it comes.

The big new this week though, as was said in my previous post, was Cataclysm, the 3rd expansion for World of Warcraft. More info was released today about the expansion, specifically on itemization (which I won't cover in this post, I'm still trying to make up my mind on how I feel about it.) and the dungeons and raids. Right off the shelves, the game will ship with 5 raid instances: Grim Batol, Skywall, the Firelands, Blackwing Descent, and the Tol Barad Prison (Vault of Archavon 2.0). It has yet to be seen whether or not these will be large scale raids or single-boss encounters, but it looks to me like the focus on raiding will be much greater in the next expansion. Also announced are several dungeons, including a new wing of blackrock spire and heroic Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines.

So that's what's coming, and I say it's great. There are changes, but without change things stagnate. Of course there will always be the whiners who will incessantly berate Blizzard, and to be honest they bring me down. It's a game right? Can't you take the changes and go with the flow?

I dunno... more on that later.

In the meantime, I'm working on trying to get a cool look for this site as well as getting some quality posts up. If you've somehow stumbled across this, bookmark it and come back in a week or so, maybe you'll see something worth reading.

And as always, screw Kungen. Monte tanks all.

(oh and in an effort to get this blog publicized, I do need to put a confirmation code in this post, so here it is. hbi7kpuy32 )