Archive for January 19th, 2009:
WMV back in action
Ever since patch 3.0, machinima creators and bloggers who like creating character images for their postings were all afflicted by the same problem. Wow Model Viewer was deader than dead, and completely unable to handle the new model files. The only workaround was to create a second install of WoW, and not patching this version past 2.4.3. Not an option that worked for me, especially as there was no access to newer files.
Finally, months later, someone picked up the project. The first new versions required downloading 2 gigs of Visual C++ Studio, but now it’s finally in a version where you don’t have to do that anymore. There are a lot of subtle changes that make it nicer to use than the old version, and maybe it’s just me, but the quality seems better to me. But I might be wrong after months of having no WMV.
Grab the latest build, 0.6.3, over at the new site where it’s going to be hosted: www.wowprovider.com
As bonus feature, you get to meet my shaman Garande, freshly re-created in WMV. She’s very shy, unlike Kadomi, so she’s cowering in fear of so much publicity. 
My first week of heroics
I wish I could say it’s been a hugely successful week in Kadomi-land, but I guess I’ll get there eventually. I didn’t PUG as much as I thought I would, it was mostly almost full guild-groups, as I mentioned. I managed to complete the easy heroics at least, with some blood, sweat and tears. I had a very good Nexus run with only two accidental wipes, and then a disastrous, called Violet Hold run. It makes me dread going back. The next day I grabbed a couple guildies and friends, and we ran Utgarde Keep and Nexus and it was ugly. Extremely wipetastic, so many tank-deaths, I felt like a noob again. Our healer had terrible lag in Nexus in particular and thus I went down so many times. It was a really low point in my tanking career, felt a lot like when I was an undergeared fury-spec scrub wiping the floor in Shadow Labs.
Nevertheless, I don’t give up easily, so the next day Drak’tharon Keep was the daily, I grabbed two guildies, managed to snag the PUG healer of the successful Nexus run, and had a smooth and easy run with no wipes. The Prophet kill was a bit messy, but all in all, excellent run. Some trash was so kind to drop Waistguard of the Risen Knight, which was a huge upgrade, and the final boss dropped Keystone Great-Ring. Wearing the ring and no def trinket my defense is down to 535, but that’s fine for heroics, and I am only waiting for 3.0.8 now to get fully enchanted for raiding. Today I promised to help the most-geared guildie who’s been pugging heroics and Naxx like crazy with Halls of Stone, so wish me luck.
Speaking of raiding, I just scheduled our first Sartharion/Archavon (if up) raid for the last weekend of January. Should give people some time to gear some more and get their stuff together. If we can make it happen, it looks like I’d be tanking, but that also means we might be short a healer. I’ll know more soon.
During the weekend, I mostly played my shaman, for several heroics, including one I hadn’t done on heroic, Halls of Stone. I think the tuning of the instance is like completely off. All bosses are a walk in the park, no challenge whatsoever, but the freaking Brann Bronzebeard event? Eight wipes, always at around 30 seconds til end of the event. The amount of mobs just got too insane at that point. Even in our successful try, most of the group was down, we got lucky. As a healer I felt the whole event was unbalanced. Searing Gaze starts at about 3:25 into the event, anything before that was easy to heal. There was not that much damage. Then you get Searing Gaze, people standing in it a tick too long, mobs everywhere, golems stunning you, etc. I know it’s supposedly easy-peasy tanking on the stairs, but that’s where mobs were tanked, and it still didn’t work out easily.
Speaking of the difficulty of heroics, it’s like back in TBC. The raiders are all saying ‘Yawn, heroics are caek, lol Blizzard we want more content’. The non-raiders who are just starting heroics, especially the ones with low DPS, they struggle. Blizzard recently started a poll asking which heroic is considered the most challenging, and the comments are full of ‘lol, where’s the option none’. Bothers me. But then, it’s the official forums, what to expect?
