The mount you'll engi-need in Patch 5.4

We posted last week briefly about the Sky Golem, the redesigned engineering mount that will allow you to pick flowers as you fly around. And we posted a picture of the Sky Claw, but now, there is video of this mount in all its glory. And guess what, Engineering just became the best profession. Again.

It's all a little confusing, really, as we were convinced that this would look like the sky claw we'd all seen before, but this is far, far better. It's effectively a shredder suit, that you put on, and fly around in. There are four different colors available, as you can see from Adriacraft's video above, and all of them look pretty great.

This is crafted by engineers, at a cost of 30 Living Steel, as well as 30 Jard's Peculiar Energy Source. These are currently created on a daily cooldown, so it's going to take engineers a while to get this mount built. However, there is no requirement for Engineering skill to use it, at present at least, so this mount can presumably be sold on the Auction House! I am leveling my engineering just to build this. And you should too.

Tags: breaking, engineering, jards-peculiar-energy-source, mount, patch-5.4, patch-5.4-ptr, sky-claw, sky-golem

Filed under: News items, Mists of Pandaria

View the original article here

Officers' Quarters: State secrets

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Privacy and information security has never been a more relevant topic than right now. With the revelation that the U.S. and British governments have been engaged in unprecedented worldwide surveillance of our Internet communications and phone calls, the threat to our privacy is very real.

As an officer, you are on both sides of such situations. It's up to you what information to collect about your members and about other guilds. It's also up to you what to keep to yourself, what to share with your guildmates, and what to share with the world. Let's look at some of the privacy issues that officers must face.

The world and your logs

Combat logs are a valuable tool. You can tell a great deal about a player or a guild's strengths and weaknesses from their combat logs. Many raiding guilds require a link to an applicant's logs before they'll invite them to the roster.

When other guilds make their logs public, go ahead and look. If you're struggling on a boss, study what other guilds are doing to beat the encounter. Look at their composition, their average DPS, the spells their healers use most frequently, etc. It's fair game, and if guilds leave their logs public, you can assume they don't mind people poring through their data.

Keep in mind, however, that all logs on World of Logs are set to public by default, which means anyone can look at them, including the rival guilds on your realm. You can keep them private if you want to, but you have to set them to be private.

If your raid team is struggling, uploading public logs may not always be in your best interest. After all, you might ask recruits for their logs, but they might look at yours before they even decide whether to apply.

Log visibility helps the community, so I encourage guilds to keep their logs public. However, no one will blame you if you don't want to show the world what you've been up to in your raids.

You're not the NSA

Applications are important for building the best possible roster no matter what your guild's goals are, from raiding to RP to PvP. Finding out about a player before inviting them helps you to keep out the troublemakers and needy players that will drag down the guild experience for everyone.

It's easy to go overboard on questions. Asking about age is relevant. Beyond that, you don't need to know where someone lives, what they do for a living, or what their kids' names are to figure out whether they belong in your guild. You're not screening NSA employees, after all, just guildmates.

It's best to focus more on their gaming and guild experiences and less on their personal lives. I like to keep personal application questions open-ended. The best one, in my opinion, is one of the simplest: "Tell us something interesting about yourself."

They won't reveal anything they don't want you to know, but their response will still tell you a great deal about them as people. Best of all, they won't feel coerced into giving up private information just to get an invite.

The no-win IP trace

If you use a Vent server, it's possible to obtain a player's IP address from the software. You can then trace that address using any of several different methods to reveal what location they're logging in from. But should you?

In most cases, a trace does more harm than good. If a raider says they can't attend because they're in a hotel room with crappy wifi, a quick IP trace might reveal that they're actually right at home. Do you really want to know this, however? It merely confirms what you already suspected. Plus, calling the player on it is likely to drive them out of the guild, whether due to outrage or embarrassment. The white lie that they're traveling is a way for them to take a night off without giving you the real reason, which they obviously considered too private to share. By tracking them down, you're not doing them or yourself any favors.

Sure, we'd all prefer that such a person be honest about their reasons, but prying into their affairs is worse. A better approach is to ask them to be honest with you rather than snooping.

If some anonymous user is disrupting your Vent, you can track their IP to figure out where they're from. That may reveal who it could be, such as a disgruntled ex-member -- if you know where they live. However, it's easier to ban their IP from the server and move on with your life.

Tactics like IP tracing might also raise real worry among your current members. If you're willing to do that, they might wonder what you would do to them if they cross you. Not to mention, the methods you use can put you in murky legal territory, depending on the laws of your country.

Damage cooldowns

Drama happens. We do our best to contain it, but sometimes it just gets away from us. In these cases, the most effective way to mitigate the damage is to keep it as private as possible. Move conversations from guild chat to whispers, a private channel, or an invite-only Vent channel. Discuss the problems with the officers in /o or in your officer-only forums.

You can't -- and shouldn't -- order players not to discuss details, but you can ask them not to.

The only time you owe your guildmates full disclosure is if the drama involves corruption within the leadership. For example, say an officer has been embezzling from the guild bank. Or they've been favoring friends with raid invites in express violation of guild policy. In these cases, you really need to disclose everything to your guild members. Otherwise, rumors will spread and no one will trust your officers again.

In the case of personal drama between players, on the other hand, the less that is said in public the better. If a player asks you about it, the best response is simply to tell them, "The officers are handling it."

If you have to discuss drama with the guild as a whole, make sure it's in a place where no one from outside the guild can overhear you or, worse, copy and paste from a website and preserve the dysfunction for all time.

Outlandish revelations

In the course of months and years in a leadership position, you may find guild members telling you very strange things about themselves. Some of it can be highly personal, shocking, or bizarre. Some of it may even be criminal in nature.

The best policy in these situations is similar to that of a psychiatrist: tell no one what you've heard unless you have a strong feeling that the person is about to hurt someone or themselves.

Short of that, zip it. Gossip is an ugly habit for a person in a position of trust.

/salute Officers' Quarters keeps your guild leadership on track to cope with sticky situations such as members turned poachers or the return of an ex-guild leader and looking forward to what guilds need in Mists of Pandaria. Send your own guild-related questions and suggestions to scott@wowinsider.com. Tags: applications, building-guilds, combat-logs, drama, featured, guide, guide-to-officers, guild-advice, guild-applications, guild-leadership, guild-management, guild-officers, guilds-guide, ip-address, ip-trace, leadership, officers-quarters, privacy, secrets, world-of-logs, wow-guide, wow-guild-management, wow-guilds, wow-leadership

Filed under: Officers' Quarters (Guild Leadership)

View the original article here

Around Azeroth: A perfect crime

Submitter Wauzledop of Doomhammer (US-A) has figured out how to get away with murder. Just kill someone that no one would ever care about! For example, an ugly bald fisherman with giant freak hands. And instead of hitting him with your spells, which would surely be traced back to you, just shove him into the water. Sure, there's no real reason for Wauzledop to drown this random human, but pointless evil is what being a shadow priest is all about. That's why they get the skulls on their armor sets.
Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm. Tags: around azeroth, around-azeroth, AroundAzeroth, featured, screen-shots, screenshots, world-of-warcraft-pictures, world-of-warcraft-screenshots, wow-screen-shots, wow-screenshot, wow-screenshots, wow-ss

Filed under: Around Azeroth

View the original article here

Drama Mamas: Guild to guild harassment

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

We've seen a lot of drama pass through these pages, but funsuckers can always surprise me with new methods of drama-mongering.

Dear Drama Mamas,

I come to you with a problem that at first seemed simple enough to fix but has proved to be a royal pain that not even Blizzard will address for me. Recently I was told by several people in my guild that they were being whispered in game by a people all from one set guild asking them if they were happy with their guild. Now normally this isn't a problem, I know people often do this to find new people but it quickly became a problem when after the said people continued to whisper the people in my guild over and over, even changing to a different toon to repeat the process.

At first this was just one person who was talked to but it soon became at least 2-3 members of my guild each day, being done so by anywhere from 5-6 different toon names from the other side. I have tired to take the correct path and just tell my member to place them on ignore, but as I said earlier after you get whispered by three different toons within a ten minute period, simply ingoing becomes very bothering.

I even resorted to speaking to their current guild master, only to be told I was a childish (insert profane words here) and quickly placed on ignore by them before I could even reply.

Sadly Blizzard has decided that this isn't an issue that warrants their attention, even after I have provided names of the harassed and the harassers, along with chat dates and times. (I've asked my members to let me know if this happens to them anymore and let me know the names involved) The only thing I can think of is to have each member on my end who was confronted to place a ticket, but even with all the information I provided them, I don't see this going very far.

Is there anything else I might be able to do? It saddens me that so many make this a daily behavior for themselves and chose to burden those just trying to enjoy their game. I am thankful that my members have not resorted to their level of childish actions.

Thank you,
Annoyed and Ignored

Drama Mama Robin: Annoyed, what is happening to your guildmates is absolutely annoying. Harassment shouldn't be used as a recruiting technique. And honestly, I'm not sure what that other guild is expecting to accomplish. Who would want to join a guild that tries to recruit in this way?

You were right to talk to the offending guild's leader to try to resolve things, but that obviously didn't work. Unfortunately, funneling all the complaints through you to Blizzard doesn't work either. When you act as the middle man between your guildies and customer service, you are putting in an extra layer of hoops for the people trying to help you to jump through.

Rather than have each person tell you when they get harassed, they should be opening up their own ticket. This is particularly the case when the offenders are changing characters to get around ignore. That is harassment and Blizzard will do something about it -- they just won't tell you what they're doing. But the report has to come from the person being harassed, not a go-between.

It is good for each person reporting to mention that this is part of an overall harassment campaign being carried on by the offending guild. As much information as possible should be put on each ticket. And another report should be made each time a person is bothered by that guild. But again, the person affected needs to make the report.

Here's a direct quote from Blizzard: DaxxariIf your harasser by-passes the /ignore feature and contacts you on an alternate character, immediately place that character on ignore, then open a support ticket to report Ongoing Harassment, and include that phrase, as well as the offending player's name, realm, the exact phrase that they used to harass you and that they by-passed the /ignore feature to do so. Please be detailed, our Support team works hard, but they aren't wizards. Mostly.
Hopefully this won't continue much longer. Good luck!

Drama Mama Lisa: Pick me! Pick me! Pick my link, I mean. Robin and I have been churning through old letters and replies to find out what issues players ask for help with the most often. Then we're compiling and refreshing our previous advice to develop the Drama Mamas No-Drama Guide. And in situations like Annoyed and Ignored's, the No-Drama Guide allows me to do this:

/summon

The Drama Mamas Guide to Handling In-Game Harassment

Robin's reminder about reporting the character-swapping as Ongoing Harassment is key. Beyond that, have each of your members follow the steps in our guide, and the repeated reports should choke out this irritation fairly soon. Remind your guild members that they rock by not stooping to countertrolling the poachers. Here's hoping this whole thing will be in your rearview mirrors soon! Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with a little help and insight from the Drama Mamas. Play nice ... and when in doubt, ask the Drama Mamas at robin@wowinsider.com. Read Robin's section of this post on how to get your letter answered and please remember that we cannot answer privately. Tags: advice, drama, featured, guild-advice, guild-drama, harassment, playing-wow, warcraft-advice, wow-advice, wow-drama, wow-drama-guide, wow-player-guide, wow-q-and-a

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Drama Mamas

View the original article here

WoW Moviewatch: The Warchief addresses your concerns!

Garrosh took a moment to talk to the people of the Horde in A message from the War Chief by Systematic. It seems that video didn't quiet all the anxiety among the people, so The Warchief addresses your concerns!

This video is basically another edition of A message, though with a few more jokes. A member of the Alliance even snuck in a question this time. Given the interplay with the official forums, this series of videos could go really somewhere. The format needs to upgrade a bit to keep it fresh, but I dig the overall gimmick. Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.
Tags: a-message-from-the-war-chief, featured, guide-to-machinima, machinima, movies, ow-machinima, systematic, the-warchief-addresses-your-concerns, world-of-warcraft-movies, world-of-warcraft-videos, wow-created-movies, wow-fan-movies, wow-guide, wow-machinima-guide, wow-movie-guide, wow-movies, wow-video-guide, wow-videos

Filed under: WoW Moviewatch

View the original article here

Blood Pact: Flow like a shaman, sting like a hunter

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill wants to look into a popular counterargument to the nerfing of Kil'jaeden's Cunning.

Or not, as I'll argue we warlocks have our own style of play.

The damage dealing game isn't just about turning a mob down to 0 points at the end of the night, but about using the mob's health bar to vault over cooldown or resource barriers. Turning a warlock into a sitting duck in PvE requires either getting rid of all the mob health bars or getting rid of the warlock, which is usually accomplished by movement or threat of certain death. This struggle against being useless is what makes choices in a damage dealer's arsenal meaningful.

Life can't be boring with all instants

The most popular counterargument to the nerfing of Kil'jaeden's Cunning is that hunters can do everything on the move, so why not warlocks. It's actually true -- the cast-time abilities of a hunter are either by default or glyphed for moving while casting and everything else is instant.

But is movement really the meaningful choice for hunters?

Standing still or on the run, Auto Shot is going to contribute for approximately 10-20% of the damage done, depending on spec. The hunter is literally standing there with his bow or gun firing plain ammunition for no special reason. Why doesn't the hunter just use the focus generator ability? You know, that one he can cast while moving?

Probably because it's actually a temporary minor DPS loss to do so. Cobra Shot does 70% weapon damage in return for 15 focus generated. Auto Shot will give a hunter 100% weapon damage going out in return for whatever amount of focus their passive generation (increased by haste) gives them.

Beastmasters and survivalists still assure me that Cobra Shot still sees action to prevent the focus bar from drying up too much, but it's clear from ranked logs that letting the bow or gun autofire is the more frequent choice. As all the regularly used abilities are instant, movement doesn't really have any effect on a beastmastery or survival hunter's personal DPS (outside of pets or traps, anyway). But Aimed Shot is a cast-time! ... or is it?

The two main focus-spending shots for marksmanship hunters, Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot, cost 50 and 45 focus each, which amounts to half the resource bar. Chimera Shot is instant but on a cooldown and Aimed Shot is that well-known glyphed for moving while casting ability.

Steady Shot, that other casting while moving ability, is not actually used for that much for focus generation. Well, it is, but it also isn't. Marksmanship hunters want to decrease either the cast time or the focus cost of their abilities, and Steady Shot helps them do both.

Steady Shot deals 60% weapon damage in return for normally 14 focus. When Steady Shot is cast twice back-to-back, the marksman gains a substantial buff to his ranged attack speed and also to his focus generation. Furthermore, Steady Shot can help stack another buff to reduce Aimed Shot's painful cast time and cost. Steady Shot is by default able to be cast while moving.

In fact, according to the Icy Veins marksmanship guide, regular cast-time Aimed Shot is labeled as a focus dump, and it's the procced instant version that sits higher up as a major ability priority. Later on, the guide specifies that it's not worth it to use cast-time, cost-heavy Aimed Shot unless the hunter is under significant attack speed or haste buffs.

There's more icing on the cake: Auto Shot is still going to contribute for approximately 10-15% of the damage done. The hunter is still impeded from using special abilities by cooldowns or focus generation, rather than aided by casting essential spells on the run.

Ability management adds complexity, meaning

Elemental shaman work better as a casting while moving comparison than hunters do. After all, the hunter resource works more like the melee-friendly energy bar, which does not work very well with caster ABCs (Always Be Casting). Melee and hunters are rather meant to be occasionally sitting on their duff with white attack damage floating by rather than being limited periodically by movement.

Shaman have a DoT just like warlocks do, but their DoT isn't for damage. Well, Flame Shock does deal damage, but they don't keep it rolling for the damage done like we do. Flame Shock's presence on a target will buff Lava Burst's damage and its ticks have a chance not only to reset the cooldown of Lava Burst, but make the nuke instant-cast. Flame Shock and Lava Burst are a rather contained set of mechanics -- that is, you can't really mess it up unless for some reason you can't cast Flame Shock.

But elemental shaman do have a shock complexity going on. Triggering Earth Shock will set its sister spell Flame Shock on mutual cooldown. Why would you want to hit Earth Shock? Elemental shaman have two passives at work with Lightning Shield: one that allows Lightning Bolts, chained or single, to regenerate mana and charge the shield, and one that buffs the damage to Earth Shock using the charges on the shield. So it turns out that Lightning Bolt isn't just another thing to cast when bored. In between the shock dancing, elemental shaman also often throw another cast-time spell into the mix: Elemental Blast. It has a 12-second cooldown, and Lava Surge will only serve for about half the Lava Burst casts. Shaman get a bit of a damage boost through their mastery, which can copy a Burst or a Bolt for a portion of the damage dealt.

So even with a movable filler cast-time spell, elemental shaman are still stuck with short cooldown management and stagger-casting for a portion of a moving fight. Spiritwalker's Grace is there to sometimes aid shaman when procs are missing to help them during movement.

Why don't warlocks get to keep a "Felwalker's Grace" cooldown, too? We have the instant Fel Flame as an option where shaman don't. The idea behind Patch 5.4's buffs to Fel Flame is that the spell can actually start filling this movement substitute role rather then continuing to collect dust in our spellbooks.

Warlocks: all your health are belong to us

I said in a podcast recently that as a warlock, "you're not really dead, until you're dead." Warlocks aren't truly finite in the resource department the way other casters are. Resource gain and spending is going on all the time as a warlock -- in fact, it's what we do. The various bars on a warlock's unit frame are very mutable during combat. We use our mana to generate our shards, our fury, our embers, and our overall damage, and then we use those secondary resources to regain mana or health again in addition to dealing more damage.

An essential part of being a warlock is realizing that all of the attackable health bars in the field are eventually going to be part of your resource bars for damage purposes, one way or another. DoTs have "cooldowns" baked in with their punch. We aren't limited by hard cooldowns because our DoTs are often high sources of damage themselves -- we would much prefer to let them run as long as possible when applied with significant stat buffs. DoTs can also generate resources or provide additional perks. We already have importance in when to cast a DoT, without movement interfering.

So we're building up this secondary resource all the time -- what makes it meaningful?

Affliction spends shards primarily on Haunt, which is a target debuff that buffs all our damage done to the target. Haunt is a fast cast, but Malefic Grasp is a channel. Haunt trades a limited resource for power, while Malefic Grasp demands safety from interruption in exchange for power. Without Malefic Grasp, affliction would be bored waiting for DoTs to tick on, so it would be quite the bummer for playstyle to interrupt the channel with movement.

Demonology spends demonic fury through abilities in Metamorphosis stance, which is already pretty powerfully mobile through the instant nuke Touch of Chaos. However, the best default gain of fury outside of a proc is to spam the cast-time Shadow Bolt. Moving all the time would result in too much fury spent and not enough gained, so demonology needs some help in the gain department. Soul Fire already has meaning, for it gets a hasty proc; Shadow Bolt needs a similar concession.

Destruction spends a whole burning ember on a hugely awesome nuke, whether that is a cast-time Chaos Bolt or the execute-limited Shadowburn. Embers are readily generated through Immolate or Rain of Fire, though less so through the latter in patch 5.4. This will place more emphasis on the gain of embers through the casts of Incinerate, which places more weight on those casts. Sure, you can't cast a Chaos Bolt on the run, but you won't be casting a Chaos Bolt at all if you can't get the embers to do so. When movement restricts spell casting, it puts pressure on spell priority, for you need to cast the best spell at the right time to make up for less damage on the run. In turn, this makes the spell rotation abstractly interesting, complex, and skill-oriented rather than gear-oriented. Total casting while moving Kil'jaeden's Cunning is overpowered and generally a boring idea -- it weakens our rotation and eventually the meaning of a well-played warlock.

The latest Kil'jaeden's Cunning change passively allows the three main fillers -- all of which have their own inherent importance to keep our rotation going -- to be cast while moving. Warlocks need movement as an challenge to casting to make life more interesting, but this recent change is a good compromise to keep movement from tipping too far into the domain of "not fun." Blood Pact is a weekly column detailing DOTs, demons and all the dastardly deeds done by warlocks. We'll coach you in the fine art of staying alive, help pick the best target for Dark Intent, and steer you through tier 13 set bonuses. Tags: affliction, chaos-bolt, destruction, elemental-shaman, featured, fel-flame, guide-to-locks, guide-to-warlocks, hunter, hutner-q-and-a, incinerate, kiljaedens-cunning, lock-guide, lock-info, lock-talents, malefic-grasp, meaningful-rotation, shadow-bolt, spell-complexity, warlock-guide, warlock-info, warlock-talents, wow-lock, wow-lock-info, wow-locks, wow-warlock, wow-warlock-info, wow-warlocks

Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

View the original article here

Has WoW Killed the MMO Genre?

Every time a new MMO is released a bunch of people hop onto their soapboxes and announce that it’s the New WoW Killer. It’s the game that will put World of Warcraft on it’s massive butt, blah blah blah.

Naturally they’re wrong and naturally all those games have either died or become pretty much “free to play.”

So here’s a different tale on the question, from The Escapist:

The boss of new MMO Firefall thinks that World of Warcraft made MMOs “too accessible.”

“Sometimes I look at WoW and think ‘what have we done?’ I think I know. I think we killed a genre.” Former World of Warcraft developer and CEO of Red 5 Studios Mark Kern believes that WoW, and its countless clones, have killed the MMO genre by making MMOs too accessible to a casual audience. In particular, the ease in leveling through the main game and the race to the mythical “endgame” has made it increasingly difficult for new developers to create rich worlds. “And it worked. Players came in droves, millions of them. But at what cost?”

Check out the whole post here.

Then, after reading it, come back and tell us what you think (keep it clean.) Has WoW killed the MMO genre? Can any company, other than Blizzard, kill off WoW? What would it take?

Sure, lots of games have prettier graphics, by far, and decent stories and so on. But does any give a Goblin’s hangnail about story anymore? I like to explore new zones and read the quests and get into the story, but does anyone else?

View the original article here