Other « Rawrcast

News has started to leak out of Blizzard that Shadow Fang Keep and Dead Mines won’t be the only instances that Blizzard makes into Heroic instances. As always, its refreshing and troubling to see Blizzard revisiting old content and adding a coat of polish. It’s refreshing because there is so much content that just sits underutilized in WOW. Its troubling because as nostalgic and fun as old content can be, it’s slightly worrying that Blizzard is sprucing up old content instead of making new content. Anyway, I’m getting side tracked. Read more…

While I’ve been out of town, one PC game I’ve been plugging away has been Torchlight. Although the game is way more Diablo than it is WoW, there are still some tips that I’ve picked up playing that are applicable to WoW.

Increase Drop Rates

Let’s face it, WoW is an exercise in choosing between loot. Whether you’re level 10 or level 80, loot is the main factor that propels you to log into raids and 5 man dungeons. If Blizzard is looking to streamline the race from level 1 to 80 anyway (see the lowered level requirements for mounts, the increased payout for low level quests, Heirloom gear, etc), why not jack up the rate of loot drops in the leveling experience. Instead of seeing a piece of loot drop at a 5% rate, why not raise it to 15%? It hardly makes a difference as most early level players are not new players, they’re actually veteran players leveling up their alts (I’d love to see some statistics to support or undermine this assumption). Read more…

<Goblin voice> Then do I have a deal for you!

We here at rawrcast are looking for talented writers that have a firm grasp of the English language and love to play WoW. Or if you are like me, you are writing while playing WoW. Or you can play and then WoW. Or WoW then write, right?

If you are interested in becoming a writer for us pick a topic and email it to me at oz AT rawrcast dot com

500 words on: (pick one)

What is a funny story you remember from playing WoW.

What is a game mechanic that your main has that you wish your alt had?

Write something about your class that you think needs improvement.

How has WoW affected your life?

I will read your submissions and those that are good will get an interview. Good luck!

So last night I managed to catch up with the rest of my guild and down Professor Putricide in 25 man ICC. After the fight was finished, it occurred to me that our regular 25 man roster had passed a certain threshold. Our tanks were surviving much longer, our healers were cranking out huge numbers and the raid wide DPS was very high. It looks like we’ve been exposed to enough ICC and Frost Badges so that everyone has received several upgrades. We had hit the tipping point where it now appears likely that we’ll be doing the Lich King in the very near future. Read more…

EDIT: I’d like to point out, after an exchange with Brig, that his preferred raiding spec is MM and not BM. He, like me, really just shares a disdain for the elitist pigs that infest our Azerothian universe. I decided to add the edit here at the top so as to maintain the fluidity of the original post. As many of you can probably tell, it takes some prewriting for me to produce a whole post and sometimes adding something in often negatively impacts the overall unity of the message. As always, I am forever grateful and joyfully relieved when anyone shares what I like to call “good guy syndrome” no matter his personal play preferences.

Noob I think it’s safe to say, many of us learned a valuable life lesson last week, and we learned it all from our involvement in WoW. We often go months with little more than the posts on boss strats, paladins being facerollers, or news that isn’t really news breaking like, “Ghostcrawler took a shower before he went to work.” In many ways, this is the kind of stuff that keeps the community alive and ticking when times are boring, but it also causes many people in our lives to shake their heads and wonder how we get so engrossed in a video game. The problem is those that try and understand rarely can make it long enough to a week like last week, when WoW brings philosophical answers about our lives and how we live them. Read more…

I have to admit that I am really excited. For two days I have been on patrol over Sholazar Basin constantly pressing my macro key and flying endless circles for hours. I can’t tell you how boring that was! It’s the same thing, over and over. I was not only worried about actually spotting him, but also wondering if someone out there was going to kill him for the achievement. To say that my nerves where shot would be an understatement. After 7 hours of hunting the first day, I logged off.

It took another 6 hours the second day. When I saw him, I actually yelled to my son that I finally found him! I swooped down off my slow mount and targeted him. I was literally shaking as I thought of the sequence of events I needed to do. I landed, and used “Call stabled pet.” I stabled my ghost saber and cursed out loud as I waited for my faithful companion to go back into her stable. I was out of agro range and I just knew that someone was going to ninja this majestic feline out from under me. I laid down a frost trap and tagged the cat, while yelling the whole time, “Hurry up! Oh God, HURRRYYYYY UP!” It seemed to take forever.

She didn’t like my shot to her head and charged in to me. It all seemed surreal and I didn’t know how bad I was shaking until I tried to maneuver around to make sure she hit the frost trap. My fingers didn’t want to work. All this time I am freaking out and I just knew that somehow I was going to mess this up. Growling and snarling, she hit my trap and froze. As I was moving my finger to the ‘5’ key to start my tame beast I realized that I made a fatal mistake. My auto-shot was just about to break my trap. “Noooooooooooooooooooo,” I screamed and cried out in frustration! All I could do now was wait and hope. My hunter was standing there, radiating love as this pissed off cat was shredding me to pieces. It was now a race between my dwindling health and my tame beast countdown. If I lost this now, I was going to just die in frustration. My screen was flashing red and “Low Health!” was up. With 8% or so left I finally tamed him! High-fives and congrats went out as my son and I celebrated! What a rush!

So I learned a lot about this elusive and extremely rare beast. I really felt like I was living the life of my hunter. Where does this beast spawn? For how long? It was like I tracking her, just like my hunter was doing in the game.

Much love goes out to the huntsmanlodge.com and their FAQ. If you want to go after this cat for achievement or taming purposes, then I highly recommend you read every last word they have up on Loque’nahak. Again, much love! She is on a 6 hour spawn, spawns in 7 (Yes SEVEN) different locations and is rumored to only be up for approximately 10 minutes a pop. That means that at best you are looking at is 40 minutes of up time during a 24 hour period. The ten minute window is under ideal conditions. I don’t think that this mob stays up for a full ten minutes before someone gets her. There are too many people mining and skinning this zone for her to go unnoticed for ten minutes. So assuming 40 minutes divided by 1440 (24 hours* 60 minutes) minutes, you are looking at a 2.7% chance of her being up.

I know that you are going to check out the FAQ and read up on this magical beast if you are serious about seeing her. The guys over at huntsmanlodge.com did an awesome job so I am not going to replicate their page. What I will suggest is a mod that I remember Haf talking about on the podcast. Silver Dragon does an awesome job of alerting when a rare is around, and even gives you a huge button to push to target the mob. It alerted me twice on my hunt—one was for a corpse, and the other got me my new pet.

I found her on the westernmost spawn point. Make the targeting macro and spam it. It was about 7 pm server. I was patrolling the southern 5 spawn points. I didn’t have a 280 speed flying mount, so don’t feel too bad if you don’t have a drake to ride. Ultimately, it is all about being in the right place at the right time. Good luck to you and good hunting.

loque'nahak I have to admit that I am really excited. For two days I have been on patrol over Sholazar Basin constantly pressing my macro key and flying endless circles for hours. I can’t tell you how boring that was! It’s the same thing, over and over. I was not only worried about actually spotting her, but also wondering if someone out there was going to kill her for the achievement. To say that my nerves where shot would be an understatement. After 7 hours of hunting the first day, I logged off.

It took another 6 hours the second day. When I saw him, I actually yelled to my son that I finally found him! I swooped down off my slow mount and targeted him. I was literally shaking as I thought of the sequence of events I needed to do. I landed, and used “Call stabled pet.” I stabled my ghost saber and cursed out loud as I waited for my faithful companion to go back into her stable. I was out of agro range and I just knew that someone was going to ninja this majestic feline out from under me. I laid down a frost trap and tagged the cat, while yelling the whole time, “Hurry up! Oh God, HURRRYYYYY UP!” It seemed to take forever. Read more…

Sometimes it sucks to suck Rawrcast.com does its best to only break news that we deem reliable. Not only that, we tell everyone that listens to our podcast that we are not a news source, so when do break something, it is because we have done our research, and we know what we are writing about is fact.

We broke the WoW TCG breakup on November 13, 2009. Now I can understand that there are people out there that won’t believe much of what we, or anyone else writes when it comes to WoW. We are not upset about any of that, we have thick skin. What is unprofessional is Sacco stating that we started a rumor and even wrote about it on wow.com. Read more…

Just because somewhere out there is someone that doesn’t know where the male draenei dance came from. The song is called Tunak Tunak Tun. It is a love song from South Asia, and the youtube video has over 13 million hits. Not bad for a video featuring one guy. Read more…

I have a love/hate relationship with WoW. I treat her like a mistress, and as I think about it more and more, this statement couldn’t be more true. Mistresses demand time and money. Today, I bought a new mouse for my laptop, even though I have learned to play just fine with the touchpad. Why? Because of healbot. I had a mouse, but it only had three buttons. Healbot supports five buttons. My current mouse wasn’t good enough anymore.

Maintenance is taking forever today, and I am pining away to play. Just like I would for a woman. it makes me sick. I made time for her, and just like a snobby bitch, she is too busy taking care of ‘personal issues’ to see me. So no, I can’t get my frost emblems right now. No, I can’t check to see if my auctions sold. No, I can’t see you. Stop calling me every two seconds. Your realm wasn’t up two seconds ago, what makes you think it’s up now?!?

So I turn away in frustration and look around. Its kinda like cheating, but its not cheating if I only look and not touch…right? Oh look the Aerie Peak server is…up! I am just gunna look and see if I can log in…oh look I got in! I can make an undead mage just to take the edge off, and before you know it, I have created another alt on a server that I am never going to play on again. Read more…

Many months ago I wrote a post about earning the Loremaster achievement. No doubt I expounded on the wonderful lore and epic quest chains that exist in WoW (to be frank, I can’t honestly remember what I wrote but you can brush up on my past post here.) Only with the passage of time have I learned the real benefits of the Loremaster achievement. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, let me talk about a friend of mine from work. We’ll call him “Stan”. Stan and I work together making video games. What this usually entails is Stan coming up with the concept of a game and me telling Stan what’s possible with the resources that we have. We usually spend at least an hour a day talking about video games: console, PC, casual, hardcore, it doesn’t matter. I love my job.