The concept of the Flame Leviathan encounter in Ulduar is pretty cool since we haven’t seen a raid encounter like it before, though we’ve seen vehicular combat in places like Wintergrasp. As a healer, I find it fun because it’s one of the only times I can actually do some serious butt kicking instead of watching health bars in a raid encounter.

WOW

It’s a pretty easy encounter, being the very first in the whole dungeon. As long as you know what you’re doing you should be fine. But of course there was one time when my guild did it in 25 man and we almost wiped but the last vehicle standing was able to win the fight for us. Easy as it may be, I never expected that the encounter could be 2-manned in the Ulduar 10 version. But apparently it happened!

Salutations to Strijder and Bekstinker from Jaedener-EU for doing this feat even if it took several wipes to accomplish!

Being a blogger it’s nice to see that I’ve left some kind of mark in the vast sea of information that is the Internet. Something that I’ve been quite fascinated about all these years is Youtube and the kind of finger print I can leave behind through that magnificent site if ever i had a video camera. My guess is that I probably won’t do much since I’m a shy type person but who knows.

Over the years I’ve been with several guilds, running all kinds of raids and I know of only one group of people that recorded some of the runs but to my knowledge I never was in any of them. If ever i was, it probably back in the days of the 40 man raids when we were doing Molten Core and who knows if I could even find myself in that kind of crowd.

my tree druid talks about his Youtube appearance

Then just yesterday I was surprised to finally see myself in Youtube! Well it wasn’t really me but my druid running 25 man Naxx. The scene that was recorded was our attempt for the Four Horsemen encounter that eventually led to the successful kill (since we wiped once because we had new guys learning the fight). I’m the sexy tree druid running around healing!

Thanks to my guildmate Bloodemyth from Casus Belli - Bronzebeard for recording and posting this video!

Patch 3.1 is still only almost a week old but the normal mode of Ulduar has already been cleared by a few guilds around the world with the many reports of Yogg-Saron kills. But for most of us, we’re still probably working our way up through the different bosses. But I’m sure a lot of us will be joining these guilds in the Yogg-Saron kills eventually.

ulduar portal

I thought that posting videos of the world first kill done by Ensidia would inspire a lot of people and also help them learn the encounter. I may not be a serious raider like some people are but what I’ve learned over the years is that no matter how much you read up on an encounter, there’s nothing like seeing it for real. There’s nothing like actually being there and reacting to the challenges of the encounter but seeing a video of a successful kill is the next best thing to actually being there.

Enjoy watching the videos!

Part One

Part Two

Patch 3.1 will be good news for all you players out there who just love collecting mounts or are tired of their current one and would want a fresh new one. Most of the new mounts coming out in the patch will be from the upcoming new content, the Argent Tournament.

more mounts

The ones from the Argent Tournament are merely old racial mounts that have new colors. If you’re tired or just fed up doing BG’s to get honor to buy that mount you want from from the BG rewards vendor, this is another way you can get. Blizzard really wasn’t kidding when they said they’ll have the mounts you need to get that achievement to collect so many.

Below is the video from MMO Champion displaying the new mounts coming in the patch.

Yesterday I was quite disappointed with the “Pimp My Mount” April Fool’s joke that Blizzard released. I just thought they could have done a bit better. Fortunately and to my surprise, that was actually just the WoW EU joke and the WoW US one was different. I checked the WoW US site and started laughing my ass off for several minutes when I saw the Dance Battle System joke. It really made up for the disappointment I had yesterday.

dance off challenge

The idea of having a sort of dance duel is a pretty clever take on the feature that we’re still waiting for where we will be able to customize our dance moves. Like Battlegrounds and other aspects of PvP, teamwork and coordination is key making this joke really funny. One good thing about seeing this joke is that we see an interface for this sort of thing in the screen shots. This is a good sign that there’s at least some progress in the customized dance feature that’s coming. This gives us some hope that the feature will be available to us soon.

Below is the video of the Dance Battle System:

As we know, patch 3.1 will be coming out soon and one of the main features of the patch is the Ulduar raid dungeon. A lot of you might be wondering what the new tiered armor looks like for your class(es) and the video above will show you. I have to say that all the tier 8 armor looks pretty cool though some might be a bit less cool than others. The gear seems to take a lot from past gear designs and turned them cooler and more suited to the Wrath of the Lich King theme. My personal favorites for the coolness factor are the shaman and warlock sets.

One of the things being talked about now in the WoW community is the feat done by a gnome mage who soloed the Military Quarter of Naxxramas. It sounds like such an impossible feat as it is but then it’s actually even more amazing since this wasn’t 10 man Naxx but the 25 man one!

Apparently, the mage the talents Incanter’s Absorption and Burning Determination together with some buffs that were stolen using Spell Steal to do the job. Using that technique, the mage was able to avoid getting silenced too often and also have the DPS to down the bosses.

Screenshot or it didn’t happen? Well the people behind this project did much better. They provided a video! Here’s the video below. This makes me really proud to play a mage!

A few days before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion comes out, we are treated to yet another progression of the big world event that we’ve been experiencing the past few weeks. the forces of the Lich King have gotten even more aggressive as frostwyrms and abominations invade the cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar. Since I play Horde, I haven’t experienced the Alliance version of this event but judging from what I’ve experienced Horde side and seen from the videos, it must be awesome too.

In the Alliance version Varian Wrynn and his companions Bolvar Fordragon, Broll Bearmantle, Valeera Sanguinar are at the Stormwind Harbor ready to fight and defend the city. My only comment is that while Varian is the king of Stormwind and the other three are his companions, it seems like all of them are quite unknown to the average WoW player. It would have been nice to see guys like Magni Bronzebeard and/or Tyrande Whisperwind helping out just like in the Horde version. The event seems to repeat every few minutes (20 minutes I think). It can be seen in the video below.

More after the break. Read more

OMG New Drain Animations! Or is it actually old? I don’t really know…

This is something I just noticed earlier when I was playing my warlock. It’s possible I never noticed it until today because I haven’t really been playing my warlock much. For some of you, this might not really be very new since I’ve seen videos of this as early as September from the beta and I’ve also read that it might have been implemented when Patch 3.02 came out. As for me, I never noticed it until today and I’m very fascinated by it since it looks awesome!

Instead of looking like a colored lasso connecting drainer to drainee, it actually looks like something could be getting drained there! The new twisting animation makes it look more classy and believable Drain Soul, Drain Mana, Drain Life or Health Funnel share this cool new animation with the appropriate color of course. Pardon me for being excited about this just now.

Below is a video of the animations in action.

Pretty much the first day the zombie plague came out, a few members had some fun building a zombie army and spreading the plague. A guild mate of mine recorded the whole thing and it’s cool that the edited version is finally out. Watching the video takes me back to when the plague was still loads of fun. I actually didn’t know they did much more than what I took part of so watching it makes me see what devious deeds they were up to while I was out. I was somewhere there during the raid Crossroads and Orgrimmar (but sadly not when they tried to infect Thrall). Hail Might of Thanatos from Bronzebeard!