Flux

Flux, we usually talk about World of Warcraft.

We update three or so times a week.  Sometimes that is on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Updated PvP Disease to include the auto unflag feature in patch 2.4.3.

Updated Best Stats with more character classes.

I know we are supposed to update weekly, but working on something new.  More to come if I don’t roll a one.

The Wrath of the Lich King expansion is only a handful of months away.  When it arrives gear will ‘reset’ making what you currently have outdated as fast as you can say level 80.  And gold will be far easier to get.  So why bother?  You could stop playing and wait for the expansion.  You will get better gear, make gold faster, and you can come back and go through all the raids you never got to see without wiping on the same boss every raid night.  You can laugh at all your friends who spend the next few months grinding in the arena, battlegrounds, and raid bosses.

Except there are six things you won’t be able to do after the expansion.  These will either be completely inaccessible or require a character at level 70 or lower.

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Some items in the game are remarkable in that they are either insanely useful or very powerful. Let’s take a look at one.

Elemental Seaforium Charge

Profile: Open locked chests and doors
Where: Auction House or Engineer
How: Crafted and usable by engineers
Loot: Elemental Seaforium Charge

The Elemental C4 Seaforium Charge is like having your own personal lock picking rogue, that explodes.  With it engineers can open locked chests and doors that require up to 350 lock picking.  This includes most chests, lockboxes, and Outland doors like the shortcut door in Shattered Halls.  The charges are fairly cheap to craft but the schematic requires revered reputation with the Consortium.  If you aren’t revered you can sometimes pick them up at the Auction House.

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Age of Conan has five different types of armor from cloth to full plate.  It also has a multitude of weapon and item types.  But it may surprise you that this doesn’t mean as much as you think.  For example, heavier armor doesn’t increase your armor more than cloth.  The type is mostly for class restrictions. However there are some hidden differences.

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As many of you know the newest MMO out is Age of Conan.  If Funcom can keep up with the voracious appetites of it’s subscribers it might make for some competition to World of Warcraft.  And with Warhammer Online out soon as well, things may get bloody.

You may see articles about these other games here under different categories.  If my need to talk about these other games becomes a condition, I’ll separate the articles for each game.  Flux was to be about more than one game.  However the World of Warcraft, the king of MMOs, is dwarfing everything else at the moment.

Most people don’t have the time or the money to play more than one MMO simultaneously.  So this year might be very interesting for players to decide what they want to do.  Perhaps people will play one until they are bored, moonlight in another, and then come back when an expansion comes out.

Whatever happens, the new blood will make for some interesting choices.

So you are dishing out damage like a cluster bomb and still not getting aggro. But your raid is wiping. People are dying and the healers are out of mana. What more can you do?

Bad dps is easy but good dps is hard. What makes for good dps? The obvious and typical answer is to top the damage meters and not get aggro. But less well know and just as important is helping your healers keep you alive.  Dead people can’t dps.

The typical mistakes bad dpsers make are getting out of range or line of sight of their healer, running away from their healer when trying to avoid damage, and not putting on stamina when it’s needed. Let’s look at some ways for dps to stay alive.

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Some items in the game are remarkable in that they are either insanely useful or very powerful. Let’s take a look at one.

Drums of Battle

Profile: You and everyone in your group does damage faster.
Where: Pattern can be bought from Almaador if you are honored with The Sha’tar.
How: Crafted and only usable by leather workers with 365 skill.  Requires 6 Heavy Knothide Leather and 4 Thick Clefthoof Leather.
Loot: Drums of Battle

There are several patterns for leatherworkers to make various types of drums which do everything from healing, increase run speed, or even fear your enemies.  But the drums that give you the most boom are the battle drums.  They are most useful for raiding and give the group an extra 80 haste rating, which is roughly 5% faster attacks and casting.  This is so useful that some players specifically level up leather working to be able to use them in end game raids. Note that they do not work in arena and you have to be a leatherworker to use them.

The buff doesn’t stack, so it’s handy to have a macro like the one below to warn other players so they don’t waste theirs. Note that this macro uses the /in command which is not a standard command. For it to work you must already have a mod installed which enables this, like Prat or Cosmos.

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Updated Best Stats with Hunter and Warlock information.