I think it’s safe to say that Blizzard finally got the LFG tool right with the new Dungeon Finder in patch 3.3 to be paired with the new dungeon system that allows players to run random heroic dungeons to no end. For a lot of players, raiding the Icecrown Citadel raid dungeon isn’t really a possibility for them for whatever reason, so running heroics is what keeps them busy and the Dungeon Finder helps with this a lot. But what may be a great strength for the Dungeon Finder and the new Dungeon system could also prove to be a “bad” thing when looks at from the proper perspective. violet hold I’m not talking about anything serious and for some people it may not even be a problem. But it certainly has been something... [Read more]

It’s been almost a week since patch 3.3 came out and all of us have been using the spanking new Dungeon Finder to form groups for our dungeon runs. While some of us do dungeons runs with a premade group, most of us who use the Dungeon Finder end up group with random people across all the servers of our own Battlegroup. Like all PuG’s, the outcome of these runs with random people have mixed results. Let’s face it, not all PuG’s are bad and in fact a lot of the ones I’ve been in were actually very good. If you think about it, all of us probably can think of at least one instance where we met someone for the first time while running a dungeon and that person is now someone you regularly run dungeons with. Maybe he... [Read more]

The World of Warcraft Armory has been very useful for a lot of people and used for a variety of purposes. While not just about character profiles, that’s a big part of why it’s so useful and even that has a variety of uses for a lot of people. People use the Armory for checking out talent builds, gear choices and stats of other players or used to ask for the help in the forums or a means to check how geared a person is for a raid. These are only some of the things that make the Armory useful and interesting. As much as all these things are useful already, it seems like the Armory is stepping up a notch with some cool new features coming our way soon. I can’t find the announcement anymore but MMO Champion caught it before it... [Read more]

It’s a bit strange that Blizzard would apply hotfixes for certain class abilities so soon after the release of the patch. Normally these issues would be addressed before the release, after all that’s what the PTR is for. But alas, here it is. I guess Blizzard saw the data from the live servers and saw that it’s something that really needs to be fixed and not left alone like they probably thought they could do. There already were a few other hotfixes announced and most of them involved other things like specific items or certain bugs to certain dungeon encounters. Those can be seen in a post by CM Crygil here. A few more recent hotfixes involving class abilities were announced by Ghostcrawler and probably have taken effect... [Read more]

A while back, Lead Encounter Designer Daelo made an announcement about the Raid Access Progression of the Icecrown Citadel: Frozen Throne raid dungeon. Basically this is Blizzard’s way of “gating” content so that all of it won’t be available to everyone right from the start. As part of this raid access progression, Daelo talked about the raid dungeon being released in sections, which is something that Blizzard did before when they released the Sunwell Plateau in the Burning Crusade expansion. When Daelo talked about raid access progression before, he mentioned that there will be a schedule for when the sections of the Icecrown Citadel raid dungeon would come out. He couldn’t say back then what those dates were... [Read more]