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"For the Horde" Interview
Q: Your guild was among the first to storm Icecrown Citadel. How do you approach new bosses when you face raid dungeons for the first time? And, just out of curiosity – how much gold do you spend on repairing your gear when you’re working on a new raid?
A: The first thing we try when fighting a new boss is simply to stay alive as long as possible and gather as much information as we can. The next step is mastering the different boss abilities one by one – we do that and push our group performance to the limit until the encounter is beaten. Some of us also create small UI modifications to time boss abilities or to set raid icons. Repair costs for these encounters vary - engaging a new boss for the first time can be expensive. During our first week in Ulduar, for example, we spent about 80,000 gold from our guild bank on repairs.
Q: A new raid instance also means guilds racing to get the first boss kills. Tell us what the atmosphere in your guild is like at these times.
A: Such phases of progress are both fascinating and stressful to us, because for a short period of time we spend many hours a day tweaking our strategies. The competition between guilds around the world is important to us and we are very happy with any first kill we get, but we are happy for other guilds when they get major achievements too. When we succeed with something especially challenging, we can get very emotional – we’ve even had neighbours knocking on our doors to see what’s going on!
Q: What are you looking forward to in Cataclysm?
A: We are very happy about the new guild system which provides guilds with lots of useful features to help them with their raiding. We are curious to see how Blizzard is going to ensure that both 10-player and 25-player raids are going to be balanced in terms of difficulty and loot distribution. We also welcome Blizzard’s efforts to continue the approach of “bring the player not the class”, for example by better distributing different buffs among the classes.
Q: What are your most treasured memories of five years of raiding in World of Warcraft?
A: Many might expect us to bring up Ragnaros or other great first kills we accomplished in the past. But after all this time, we have come to realize that the most important thing is the fun of playing together and the relationships we’ve built up.
Cataclysm Glyphs
Prime glyphs aren't going to be exciting in a "change up your rotation" style. We want primes to be unambiguous dps (etc.) increases so we figured they might as well be easy to understand rather than something so convoluted that everyone would just go to a fansite to see which 3 to pick.
The majors are more interesting, because they are either not dps increases at all, or dps increases in ways that are tricky to math out. We think players will debate and geek out more about which majors to use, and with the new glyph design, swapping them out once in awhile isn't very painful.
Minors are basically convenience or fun.
We don't want glyphs to change rotations. We feel that was a mistake in LK. Talents should affect your rotations, and glyphs should just provide a little bit of customization and power. We fixed some class problems with glyphs in LK, which was an easy solution to do at the time, but now is the time to undo all of that and let the classes stand on their own without the glyphs.
Uldum questing will replace ICC+ gear
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