World of Warcraft

By Redestium
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Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted

Thoughts for hardmode this week:

  • Shannox: We did him on saturday(?) with "badly geared" alts (mix of blues, greens, 353/359 epics. Best geared toon is my paladin which had full normal mode raid gear but not 4 piece). The thinking was "If we pretend this is hard mode and use the same strategy then maybe we'll be able to pick it up for reals on Tuesday
  • Baelroc: Our guild has solid DPS: we consistently rank top-100 from the start to end of content. In order to kill this fight on 10-man you can assume 2 tanks averaging 10k DPS each, and 5 DPS pulling just shy of 29k DPS (which we don't have) or 6 DPS pulling just shy of 24k DPS (which we do have). After Sinestra, BQL, Yogg, Council, etc. we're pretty good at handling brain-link beams.
  • Beth'tilac: We dominated the fight on normal mode. The hard mode version seems to be similar but with an extra add you have to kite around and kill. Fortunately we did sinestra and twilight council so we've pretty much got that on lock-down.
  • Domo: Same basic encounter except you get a pretty sweet damage/healing buff. We're actually going to get an orb phase (we killed him in 4 phase-changes on normal mode so we didn't see it) but the basic "stand near X until Y happens" doesn't seem to scary. If it's going to cause a problem I bet it'll be the hard enrage. Fortunately we've got an affliction lock, shadow priest, and fire mage that can cheese the hell out of the extra damage buff.
  • Ryolith is now Viscidus on hard mode: nobody wants to do that garbage.
  • Alysrazor: add in the Sindragosa cubes requirement, this will probably be a huge pain in the ass, it's low on our list too. I have some thoughts about how we might go about killing it, but I think my plan is ultimately a "cheese it" strategy. Worth a try, but probably something we'll have to work at.
  • Ragnaros. We all want our fancy title but he's pretty low on the list based on the assumption that everything else is easier.

Rightly now there are two guilds we're in competition with: a 10-man startup horde side that picked up a rag kill a day or two after we did (but finished Tier 11 9/13). I'm hoping they do well because there really aren't any good 10m guilds on the server if you don't count mine. There's also a 25m alliance side that many of my friends raid in (I have an alt there and helped shuffle a trinket cross faction for their tank yesterday). They ended up 12/13 but are very good players and I expect them to do very well.

The other 25s on our server didn't manage to unlock hard mode for this week. The better ones tried making a 10m groups to put a couple of days work into Rag. and unlock hard modes for this week but I guess they just couldn't put it together. I had expected the server to have half a dozen 7/7 guilds for this lockout but I guess I estimated poorly. I'm sure they'll get him soon enough but in the mean time they've lost a week of hard mode practice. While ultimately I consider our competition region or world-wide, I care more about winning the local rat-race. It's much easier to get excited about a competition with friends/enemies that you'll encounter on a weekly basis than people that you'll never meet.

Raid starts in 3 hours?

Grand Master

Noveed

Posted
Posted

Wanna make a video from a fraps recording but want to make it in HD and want the quality to be really good (on youtube as well) ... any ideas how to do this. Windows Movie Maker just does not cut it and the quality on youtube is bad and blurry even when I used the HD wmv stuff. Any ideas on software and codecs that a required to produce a good quality move?

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted

I fraps my raw footage at 1080p60 with "force losseless rgb" enabled. I've got a simple raid-0 set of 5400 RPM drives that I dump the raw video too. it burns up about 8gb per minute so you'll need fairly large drives.

When I'm done I dump that into Virtualdub to crank out a quick and dirty AVI (1080p30) which I import into premier. Edit in premier (increase brighteness about 5% because youtube will crush it) and when you're done render out the video at 1920x1072 at 30fps. The 72 is needed because youtube does some weird resizing and you want the vertical size to be an even multiple of 16 for best final quality (otherwise it'll resize to 1072, do it's encoding, then resize back, that makes everything blurry).

For final output I use h.264 with a target bitrate of 16mbit and a maximum bitrate fo 20mbit. Your final product should be about 1gb for every 5 minutes of video.

There's no real trick other than record at the highest possible quality, render out at a high bitrate to 1920x1072, 30 FPS, and increase the brightness slightly.

Grand Master

Noveed

Posted
Posted

I fraps my raw footage at 1080p60 with "force losseless rgb" enabled. I've got a simple raid-0 set of 5400 RPM drives that I dump the raw video too. it burns up about 8gb per minute so you'll need fairly large drives.

When I'm done I dump that into Virtualdub to crank out a quick and dirty AVI (1080p30) which I import into premier. Edit in premier (increase brighteness about 5% because youtube will crush it) and when you're done render out the video at 1920x1072 at 30fps. The 72 is needed because youtube does some weird resizing and you want the vertical size to be an even multiple of 16 for best final quality (otherwise it'll resize to 1072, do it's encoding, then resize back, that makes everything blurry).

For final output I use h.264 with a target bitrate of 16mbit and a maximum bitrate fo 20mbit. Your final product should be about 1gb for every 5 minutes of video.

There's no real trick other than record at the highest possible quality, render out at a high bitrate to 1920x1072, 30 FPS, and increase the brightness slightly.

Thanks for the tips. I saw the 1072 side and though it was weird strangely enough I have already started to encode the video so ill see how it looks after. Hard drive space might be an issue. Only have a 256GB SSD in my laptop and its pretty full so recording Lossless through fraps might pose some issues with size, seen as though its a laptop (alienware) it might not perform well and lag to hell whist I am online.

Mentor

S00N3R FR3AK

Posted
Posted

Man HMs, I'd be happy to see those before the end of summer. Got our first kill tonight with Beth. RNG was in my favor with a S10 trinket off occ, S9 pants off argaolth, the Xbow on like our 3rd trash pull in firelands and the shoulders I can't use for now off Beth. Losing my 4 piece is a big dps loss and I have to wait to use my new shiny piece.

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted

So....any guilds recruiting a ret pally? I've cleared normal Firelands. :p

I might be. How do you feel about having a tank offspec that gets used 30-60% of the time?

Shannox died. Ryoloith is "messy" but hopefully tonights hot-fixes will help. Beth'tilac might be possible but we're probably not doing her next (punishment is high for failure, but if we can solve positioning it's within grasp).A handful of pulls could just barely keep downstairs together for one full phase. Forum posts indicated that her adds had the same health in 10 and 25m so maybe maloriaks old bugs had made a return. We moved on to other encounters for now.

I'm curious about the buff to Baleroc: 10% probably puts him out of our reach this week unless we tried a 1 tank/2 healer strategy like we used for council. A buff of 15%+ probably makes him unreachable without more gear.

Grand Master

Prosidius

Posted
Posted

I'm glad they buffed hard modes, it's retarded guilds are already 4/7 heroic in the 2nd week of the raid. Unless the next 3 bosses are at an insane difficulty level they will be farming Firelands till whatever raid comes out next for the next 5 months.

I recently switched my OS to holy since I found I never tanked as prot (and my prot gear was not that good).

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted

I'm glad they buffed hard modes, it's retarded guilds are already 4/7 heroic in the 2nd week of the raid. Unless the next 3 bosses are at an insane difficulty level they will be farming Firelands till whatever raid comes out next for the next 5 months.

I'm glad they're hard but I don't think blizzard will be able to stop top-end (the top ~150 players total) players from quickly clearing content.

The day Sunwell came out SK went 3/6 and then ran into a gate. Eredar twins died the day the gate opened in the UK. M'uru the guild breaker and Kil'Jaeden both lasted lasted < 96 hours from the time their gates opened. Black temple was cleared during the second raid lock-out. etc.etc.etc.

The only way to gate content 'naturally' is to have DPS/tank/healer checks that require a substantial portion of loot from an instance. They could tune Domo so he required ~38,000 DPS from a raid that assume 7 or 19 DPS, but in doing so you you have to contend with raids just stacking multiple overpowered classes. A single target tank and spank could be substantially easier if you just brought 10 arcane mages (or shadow priests, or MM hunters, or whatever flavor of the month is on top right now). If you tune to make it challenging even if a guild does that sort of thing then you're blocking out almost the entire raiding population that simply can't do that.

It's not realistic to make an encounter with a substantial tank gear check either because classes will stack enternal damage cooldowns to compensate. Unless they introduce "gimmick" gear sets (resist gear being the obvious example) there's no reasonable way to make a punishing tank gear check that wouldn't be easily met by top-end guilds.

Let's remember that Paragon was 13/13 at the end of January and yet how many people managed to match that?

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted

If I remember right Paragon was the only kill of HM LK 25 for a couple weeks, the next guild to kill it didnt do it till the buff was @ 15% I believe which was like a month or so later.

Keep in mind he was gated with only a handful of attempts to pull him. While other guilds certainly guilds certainly could have given him hell, most people probably only had a dozen or so pulls to try him because clean kills of Putricide, Sindragosa, and to a lesser extent BQL and Saurfang probably weren't happening for the first few weeks even for very good guilds.

Even today, 3/7 would make you #6 US - I don't think that's completely out of the question for top end guilds. If you want "real hard mode" (or "easy mode being cleared by baddies" depending on your bias) then look at 10m progress. 2/7 ties you for the second best 10 man guild in the world, 3/7 ties you for 14th best for both sizes and makes you the best 10m group on earth. We're talking about the best 350 players in the world being 4/7.

The number of players raiding today is larger than the number playing organized basketball at any level (highschool, NCAA, NBA, Olympic). The number of players even attempting hard mode (or going 12/13 HM last tier) is about on par with the number of College + Olympic players around the world. The number of 4/7+ players is smaller than the number of people in the NBA, and the number of people who have seen 5/7 would barely make a Lakers v. Bulls game possible.

Apprentice

Sethalos

Posted
Posted

Can someone explain to me the general idea of a MMORPG? I loved WarCraft III and would like to try this one out.

From what I can gather, you meet up with a bunch of people. Now, when you join a clan (party, whatever) do you all set out on the same quest and fight the same enemies? Are there quests designed specifically for parties (meaning they require 5+ players to beat)? I realize these are pretty general and rookie questions...gotta start somewhere I guess :)

Thanks.

World of Warcraft is a game that allows you to play alongside thousands of others interacting through real time. You have a choice of faction (Alliance/Horde) and have several race choices such as; Human, Dwarven, Night Elf, Gnome, Drenai, Worgen, Blood Elf, Tauren, Troll, Undead, Goblin, Orc. You then choose your Class such as; Mage, Warlock, Priest, Druid, Shaman, Warrior, Death Knight, Paladin, Hunter, Rogue.

Once that is complete you start in a Starting Area, and you begin the long process of leveling your character through Questing, Dungeons (instances), PvP (Player vs Player), and Solo grinding for professions(Alchemist, Blacksmith, Engineering...etc). Keeping in mind that thousands of others are playing and doing the same things you are at the same time, you see them, you talk to them, you fight them, and eventually you may join them in a Guild.

The immersion is great, there is plenty to do (through leveling) that will keep you occupied, and if you like battling it out with others there are Battlegrounds/Arenas.

There are several expansions that add content/gameplay changes, and there is a constant progression for your character.

Now...I will say that there is an ongoing shift in the game that has caused alot of controversy, debate, and anger over recent changes. If you're new it isn't something that you will really notice too much while leveling your character, however, once you reach 85...well...You can make up your own mind. If you decide to play...good luck.

-Seth

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted

You forgot about WoW's biggest trait, and that is raiding. Getting 10 or 25 guys to play together and down a boss with quite a few mechanics is a challenge in itself.

He's responding to a post made nearly 7 years ago.

Encounter is a little stressful (you can tell from the voices) - we spent a couple of hours with really bad strategy (ie: trap one dog then the other: alternating) which made instant-deaths much more likely. We had a bunch of sub-optimal things going on. Only the mage and I could reliably break facerage. I was the only person consistently able to be in range of the dog to snare it (howl wasn't reliably being applied), and we couldn't set off fire traps as much as we'd like so the playing field was a little messy. Ultimately a pretty fun encounter - it's a shame it's so annoying to get to the boss and clear a place to fight him.

I inherited a copy of Final Cut Pro X from a friend who bought it and promptly said "this is worthless". To me it seems like a nice version of iMovie but really not aimed at professional video editors?yet. I played with it's integrated youtube sharing but forgot to do the whole 1072 thing so quality is a bit off. I should probably output to prores and then re-encode with compressor because quality is a little crappy. Mostly it's not a bad editing environment for this sort of thing: ~10 minutes from "raw fraps encode" to pressing the "share with youtube" button is pretty good turn around time. The ability to do distributed rendering is kinda cool. I have half a dozen macs in the house so if it worked I could cut final exports from say 45 minutes to 10 minutes which would be awesome. I never really liked premier but it was paid for by my last job so it was my only option outside of iMovie (which didn't allow for some of the things I'd like to do).

I'll probably stick with it for this tier worth of videos, it seems really well suited for wow video editing. For $300 it's probably worth considering instead of the other popular options (vegas and premiere) provided you have a mac to run it on.

Grand Master

Shaun N.

Posted
Posted

Anyone remember the guy that made the program to sync addons from OSX and Windows? I'm finding myself switching back and forth quite a lot now and its getting a little annoying having to keep installing and uninstalling addons from one to another.

Mentor

kazuyette

Posted
Posted

Anyone remember the guy that made the program to sync addons from OSX and Windows? I'm finding myself switching back and forth quite a lot now and its getting a little annoying having to keep installing and uninstalling addons from one to another.

Curse Client may do the trick mate.

Mentor

MikeFu84

Posted
Posted

Anyone remember the guy that made the program to sync addons from OSX and Windows? I'm finding myself switching back and forth quite a lot now and its getting a little annoying having to keep installing and uninstalling addons from one to another.

This? https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/966070-world-of-warcraft-addon-syncing-app-beta-testers-wanted/ also this http://www.kennettnet.co.uk/products/teleportaddons/

Grand Master

Shaun N.

Posted
Posted

So - Here's a little story...

I rerolled on Silvermoon EU as I had 1 of each class over 80 (3 of them 85) and I wanted to play them all as I liked each of them. I hated the feeling of not spending enough time on a particular char so rolled a DK and I have every intention of sticking to the 1 char from now on.

It took me 2 weeks to be 85 tanking heroics as I lvl'd blood and spammed dungeons. Last friday I was asked by my guild to tag along and do some offtanking in their BWD/ BoT run, I said sure and could possibly get some loots.

At the end of the night we had cleared BWD and BoT and went on to also clear TotFW. I knew they nerfed them but Geez! The last time I raided was March on my hunter and we were getting 1 maybe 2 bosses down in either BWD or BoT with no intention of stepping into TotFW yet.

I now have 1 peice short of a full tier DPS set with a couple of extra Tanking items.

http://eu.battle.net...systolic/simple

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