My Thoughts On The New LFG

The new Looking for Group feature has been out for a long enough time now for me to lay down my verdict on its usefulness. I haven’t used it enough to get the companion pet but I have run enough Heroics at this point to get lots of new gear on two of my characters. After dozens of runs across both of them I can safely say the new LFG is the greatest addition to this game in a long time.

Keep in mind that I’m almost 100% strictly a 5-man Heroic player in a guild with limited player activity so this tool is perfect for someone like me. It allows me to jump on at almost any time of the day and find something to do. While the queue times for a DPS class seem to be between five and ten minutes in my Battlegroup, on my Healer I’m seeing queue times measured in seconds and not minutes. It’s never been hard to find a group on my server as a Healer but it wasn’t unheard of to have to wait for 30 or more minutes as a DPS class. Now that the new LFG is composing groups out of players from multiple realms that long wait has been eliminated from the game and I couldn’t be happier.

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The Armory iPhone App Has Been Updated

The official Mobile Armory iPhone App was recently updated with a few common sense features that were painfully missing from the app’s initial release. The first version of the Mobile Armory app was an incredibly useful, almost exact clone of the current Armory website. It allows the viewing of tons of information about every character on your account including: gear, achievements, talents and guild information as well. You could bookmark any character not on your account to make tracking their information easier as well.

Unfortunately, the first version was missing the best part of the actual Armory website and that’s Gear Upgrades. The web site lets you select any item on your character and get a comprehensive list of every piece of gear in the game that would be an upgrade over your existing piece of gear.
Other upgrades with this new version include some simple stuff like changes to the user interface and some new sound effects. The new sound effects, while unimportant to someone who has never used the app before, are a boon to people like me who found the version 1.0 sounds to be absolutely terrible.

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Christmas Time In The World Of Warcraft

The Christmas themed in-game holiday, Winter Veil, is currently underway and along with it comes plenty of activities for all of the achievement hungry players out there. I’m personally not a big fan of these world events but I know a lot of people are striving to finish “What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been” and feel almost obligated to complete each one.

Don’t forget that as the holiday comes to a close the giant Christmas trees in Ironforge and Orgrimmar have gift boxes underneath them. This part of Winter Veil runs from December 25th to the end of the holiday on January 2nd. The gifts range from companion pets to holiday themed food items. For the last two years, the most rare of the companion pets has been pretty excellent so I am looking forward to what this year has in store. In 2007, the pet was a small clockwork robot and last year it was a remote controlled car.

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Say Hello To The New Economy!

So I totally bought the new vanity pets being sold online at the Blizzard Store. I bought Lil’ K.T. for myself and the Pandaren Monk for my girlfriend. It was an instant purchase and no-brainer for me since we’re two avid companion pet collectors and, honestly, the price wasn’t outrageous enough to deter me.

I have purposefully avoided everyone else’s comments or thoughts on this new microtransaction movement in the game. I would imagine most players are angry and upset over this money play by Blizzard. Well, I’m of the total opposite opinion on this. These pets don’t give you an advantage and anyone who argues that this lays the groundwork for that to eventually happen is just overreacting and speculating at this point.

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The New Alterac Valley Strategy

I played a lot of Alterac Valley this weekend, both on my Death Knight and Holy Priest, and almost every fight was very similar. It would seem, on my battlegroup, the new strategy to win is to rush like always to the top of the map and then wait for one or two bunkers to cap before going for the boss. Typically, in the past, you would wait and struggle for all four bunkers to cap before going for the boss.

It would appear to me that we’re all so well geared at this point that we can kind of forego the “traditional” method of winning in Alterac Valley. I don’t even know if people are bothering to wear PvP gear inside the Valley anymore. I know I’m certainly not on my Holy Priest because I love 16k+ Greater Heal crits and I just don’t get those in my crappy Hateful Gladiator gear.

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How Many Honorable Kills Do You Have?

Last night, at the start of another Wintergrasp struggle, I crossed the 25,000 Honorable Kills mark on my Hunter. This achievement was a long time in the making, of course, and I’m what some would consider an above average PvPer… at least in the sense of the time I devote to it and not particularly because of my skill level.

The Poll

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Struggling In Wintergrasp

I was intrigued back when the new queue system for Wintergrasp was announced because I thought it might give the Horde on my server at least a puncher’s chance against our better geared and better organized Alliance enemies. Unfortunately, the exact opposite has taken place and our control of the zone has become an even rarer occurrence than before the queue was implemented.

No One Shows Up

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Glory Of The Hero

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been devoting almost all of my playing time towards finishing up the rather daunting, to me at least, Glory of the Hero achievement. I’m proud to say that as of last week I wrapped up the last few required achievements needed and now I’m flying around on the fancy Red Proto-Drake you see above.

I wanted to write a short post about the individual achievements we struggled with the most so that anyone else thinking about taking a run at this has a basic idea of the challenges ahead of them.

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