Rez of the Week – Cassiaa

Playing a restoration shaman to their maximum potential takes a special kind of person in my mind.  I opt for the easy way out, chain heal spam, but they have a HUGE arsenal of different heals to take advantage of.  Cassiaa is one of those extra ordinary people that play this class/spec to its fullest potential.

Cassiaa is one of a handful of players that I know I can count on to do their job and do it well.  Because of her well played ability she almost never hears from me.  She’s amazing.  She’ll take random sabbatical’s and everytime she comes back I do this big puffy chest macho man I’m in control here speech, “Cassiaa, you went AWOL and cuz of that I had to fill your slot.  I can’t guarantee you an opening now if you signup.”

She signs up.

I slot her.

Yea… she’s got me whipped.

Without further ado…

White Picket Fence

You might not have heard by now (how the fuck is that possible?!) but Icecrown will have gating like Sunwell and Trial of the Crusader had.  The official blue post…

Icecrown Citadel testing has been progressing very well over the last few weeks, and this has been a huge help to the encounter design team. We want to thank everyone who has logged onto the PTR and tried the encounters there.

As we’re now getting closer to the release of 3.3.0, we wanted to talk about our plans for access progression within Icecrown Citadel. Icecrown Citadel is going to be broken up into four distinct sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. We plan on releasing these four sections of Icecrown Citadel over time and not all immediately when patch 3.3.0 goes live. At this point we can’t give precise dates for these release dates as they are determined by when patch 3.3.0 goes live. Once dates are known with more certainty, I’ll update the community so they can plan appropriately.

(the rest of the blue post…)

…if you hop’d over and read it you will scratch your head, go WTF?!, reread it, and still be wondering wtf they are doing.

The first area released is going to be the Lower Spire.  There are 4 bosses in it and you will have unlimited tries (as far as I can tell) to kill these four bosses.  After they are dead you get to go work on heroic.  Heroic ToC that is.  Because A) you killed the bosses already, there isn’t a seperate heroic instance and B) you can’t work on any bosses on heroic in Icecrown until you have killed Arthas.  The part that gets me, “Progress beyond that point will be prevented for several weeks.“

Several weeks?!

I’m hoping that is one of their infamous typing slipups.  I can’t imagine these first four bosses to be anymore difficult than the first four bosses of Ulduar.  They certainly didn’t take several weeks to kill.  If anything this worries me.  This tells me that Blizzard has the first 4 bosses ready to go and maybe the next set of bosses after it… but they DON’T have the stuff after that ready.  My guess is that they are going to release Icecrown in patches so they don’t have to do one big patch.  If you raid on Tuesday’s… expect lots of issues.

If the bosses were extremely hard (which I”m doubting they are) then the gating probably wouldn’t be so bad.  Anyone remember zoning into ToC on that first night and taking down Northrend Beasts and going… srsly… this is it?  Then you come back next week to Lord Diesuperfast.  Let’s face it, until the nerf, the Fuction Champs was the most difficult encounter in there simply due to its unpredictability.

We’ll see how it goes.  I’m usually wrong so nothing to worry about.  Best case scenario Icecrown comes out in one patch and we get access to the new zones every week (or every other week).  That way we get Arthas by Xmas.

Mountain o Mounts (93/100)

Marisse is into nerd points (read: achievement points).  She really lives for them and I’ve managed to capitalize on this very recently.  She’s been gathering a group of talented people for Ulduar achievements and it culminated this last Sunday with…

[insert picture of xeo on a rusted proto drake that he accidentally deleted off his computer cuz he's a tard]

so… yea… I mighta deleted my screenshot because I thought I had already uploaded it.  It looks like I didn’t though.  I do have the big pic posted on our guild site though!

Calm Before the Storm

You can tell 3.3 is on the horizon.  No, I’m not referring to reading MMO Champs or World of Raids… but by looking for your friends online.  People are starting to take those, “I’ll be back when Icecrown comes out.” breaks.

Rez of the Week – Watz

Watz is…

A: One of my best friends.
B: The best hunter I know.
C: Someone with too much time on his hands.
D: All of the above.

I’ve known Watz for about 12yrs now I think.  We started playing Magic: the Gathering together back in High School and progressed into a bit of Dungeons and Dragons, MUDs (Multi User Domains, think text based WoW).  Then I got introduced to Everquest and it didn’t take me long to get him hooked as well.  He played a Paladin back then and we’d duo the shit out of stuff.

We stayed mostly in the same guilds, eventually I dragged him into one of the top guilds on the Rallos Zek server, Wudan, and we were both at the world first killing of Kerafyrm (the Sleeper).  Yes, I realize thats nerdtastic!  After that achievement Blizzard had just started Beta for World of Warcraft.  They contacted our guild leader and we both got into the initial beta for WoW.  As soon as it went live… we jumped ship.

Since then I’ve had a chance at watching him do things with the hunter class that I see others just amazed at.  He was always a spec that wasn’t quite the norm for hunters and always excelling at it.  He’s an amazing friend and an amazing WoW player.

Without further ado…