Cho'Gall has now left the building!

Finally after what seemed like hundreds of deaths to Cho'Gall (I'm sure the number was a lot less to be honest) the guys of Saturday Knight Fever (sadly there were no real life gals in the raid) killed Cho'Gall.

Last week I had experimented with a 4 man ranged team that simply obliterated the adds but left too little DPS on the big fella himself and meant we lost a lot of time switching and caused people to make minor mistakes which in turn led to too much corruption which really hurt us in the final phase. This week we went with 3 ranged and 2 melee and on the very first pull of the night down he went.

Add On: GTFO

A real quick post to plug my current best friend type addon, GTFO.

Put in the authors own words, GTFO is:

GTFO provides an audible alert when you're standing in something you're not supposed to be standing in. In some cases, you'll be warned before you start taking damage. This mod improves your situational awareness and is recommended for dungeon divers and raiders of all skill levels as even the most seasoned veteran sometimes needs a reminder to GTFO.

Its something that allows you to have your tunnel vision, healing blinkers or whatever is distracting your attention from the fire beneath your feet, a simple "beep" type noise alerts you to potential danger. Its really simple works straight out of the box and really I don't know why anyone should be without it.

If you're certain that you avoid 100% of such damage, I challenge you to download it use it for a month and prove to yourself how awesome you are. If you've managed to not trigger this addon for a month please leave a comment below, uninstall the addon and apply to join Saturday Knight Fever on the Shadowsong EU realm.

wowTrader - a fantastic tool for making gold

Just a real quick post to introduce you all to a fantastic tool, wowTrader, its not a nasty gold seller site so no need to panic, I haven't gone to the darkside. 

In wowTraders own words "it is primarily a site built around the ability to view auction house prices over time for your server so you know what items are actually worth. Each item has an individual page with graphs showing recent history, long term trending, availability and historic price distribution."

If you're on the US realms  wowTrader isn't available and you'll need to continue/start using the Undermine Journal, which has been online for quite sometime now  but never progressed to pick up the EU data.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Well 1st I hope you all like the new look to the blog, it was forced upon me by the fact that I wanted a proper banner type logo and as I'm not particularly gifted in the artistic department the image above is as good as it'll get.

On top of that, Blizzard have kindly made some changes to the authenticator system, as described in the US forums in a post from Zarhym that reads:

If you use an authenticator – and we hope you do – you may soon notice that an authenticator prompt may not appear with every login. We’ve recently updated our authentication system to intelligently track your login locations, and if you’re logging in consistently from the same place, you may not be asked for an authenticator code. This change is being made to make the authenticator process less intrusive when we’re sure the person logging in to your account is you.

We hope to continue improving the authenticator system to ensure the same or greater security, while improving and adding features to make having one a more user friendly experience. If you don’t already have a Battle.net Authenticator attached to your account, don’t wait until it’s too late -http://us.battle.net/en/security/checklist 

Do you think this is a good thing? I'm torn and would really like to know more. I ALWAYS log in form home, never at work, at a friends or on a public computer and I don't find having to use the authenticator intrusive, sure it is annoying in the middle of a raid when you get DC'd that I have to hunt for my iPhone to use the authenticator but its always on my desk anyway and if there is a short cooldown on the need to re-authenticate (say 30 minutes to 1 hour) thats cool and will save a few precious minutes. But any more than that and I become more nervous about the security and already I actually feel less secure than I have done since getting the authenticator way back when.

Maybe I'm being paranoid. Do you have concerns over this? If so, please leave a comment so I can judge your views.

Solving the Raiding Conundrum

A lot has been said about raiding becoming too dumbed down in 4.2 much like it was in Wrath and this post is aimed at "solving" the issue.

Problem 1: Blizzard wants us all to see the content and feel like we're not all miles behind the best guilds;
Problem 2: Hard core guilds want hard content;
Problem 3: Normal players want challenging content;
Problem 4: Epics for running heroics kills lower tier of raiding from same expansion;

The solution struck me whilst listening to Totalbiscuit read an email on the Blue Plz! show from June 4th. We can solve all problems at once.

Priesting 101: Becoming a Talented Discipline Priest

Hot on the heals (see what I did there?) of the Holy Priest 101, I bring to you the guide to being a Discipline priest, OK finally may have worked better I admit). Once again I shall guide you through the talents, tier by tier and by the end of it you will be armed with the knowledge to allow you to make an informed choice on which of the 2 healing methods suits your style of play best.