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that kind of sucks, i was hoping to just gain the normal rep from normal modes until i decided which faction to grind rep for(probably in heroics after the nerf).

What nerf are you talking about? According to blue posts, Blizzard is happy with the difficulty of heroics right now and rightfully so.

the inevitable nerf to content that happens with all new content in wow a few weeks or so after it is released after the hardcores have cleared it all. seems like a lot of qq over just how hard heroic 5 mans are right now, and raiding seems prohibitively expensive for the average raid player.

anyways thanks for the link smeltn.

the inevitable nerf to content that happens with all new content in wow a few weeks or so after it is released after the hardcores have cleared it all. seems like a lot of qq over just how hard heroic 5 mans are right now, and raiding seems prohibitively expensive for the average raid player.

That is assuming Blizzard hasn't learned from what it has admitted to be mistakes. There were many bad decisions made in Wrath, which is what I'm guessing you have experience in.

I honestly don't think they will nerf it though. Blizzard is extremely happy with the current contents difficulty as am I. Its back like Vanilla wow, nothing is free anymore it requires work. Once people stop trying to blow through something without crowd control, like shaman's spamming chain lightning, it will be ok. As far as costing a lot in raids.. its not NEARLY as bad now as it was in Vanilla wow. Gold is SO easy to make now and TONS of it, I mean I can make 1k a day just from doing dailies.

I am loving the difficulty. Sure I find myself frustrated at times depending on the group you get in, but again Blizzard is pushing more towards guilds now, with perks, and bonus' for doing guild runs, etc, so it really makes it worth wile to get with a guild and do dungeons with them so you stop getting the randoms who have no idea what they are doing.

Yeah if you read the official forums they keep saying that they are ok with the new difficulty because they are trying to make the game more difficult, make heroics exactly that heroic, and make epic drops something to work hard for. I am very happy with the change.

meh i don';t plan on doing much pve myself, i'm just seeing lots of qq everywhere about it. from what i hear the hardest thing about vanilla raids was getting 40 ppl together for them on a regular basis that were semi competent.although i do agree it's alot easier to make gold now, i'm just referring to evn's post about how much he is spending per run or week or w/e it was. iirc he is going through more per week then i made getting to 85 from 80.

as for the empahsis on guild stuff, i think there are pros and cons and wow players are also going to have to go through a paradigm shift. wotlk seemed to be all about hte PUG and many people are going to have to get used to doing something with a guild, which isn't for everyone. i'm still seeing lfm for lk pugs in ./2 on my server.

i think even if less casual raiders are happy with the current dificulty(and they tend to be happier with higher dificulties of any content) and even if there have been blue posts saying blizz is happy with current dificulty, i think they will look at the stats on % of raiders completing content vs raiders still banging their heads on it and do a nerf, depending on those stats. i don't think it they will be nerfed to wotlk levels by any means, but to some degree that makes them more accessible to players outside of the top 5%. it might not be until the next content patch.

i mean i'm happy for the hardcore raiders that are happy they no longer one shot supposedly hardmode content on their first attempt at it like i hear was happening in wotlk, but as far as heroics go, which probably represents a broader chunk of the wow end game pve playerbase, there's very little reason that after a paradigm shift back to somethign similar to tbc playstyles with marking and ccing trash among players is widespread, there can't be nerfs to makes it more accessible while retaining a degree of dificulty even with the proper gear.

i mean i'm just looking at blizz actions in teh context of the last 4 or so years in which nerfs have been fairly predictable and a part of the game. hardcore guilds do content before the nerf, normal mode guilds do content after the nerf. this was true of tbc as well, though i don't recall nerfs in vanilla(which is before i played/paid attention at all)

if there isn't a nerf i think a lot of players who did endgame pve in wotlk for example are going to get frustrated with the paradigm shift needed to do them, and go to a more pvp or non gear progression focus, and if that happens i think blizz wil react to get more players into endgame pve again.

i'm pretty sure i wasn't th onyl player who got sick of incompetent players in their own guild wiping them on bosses in normal mode 5mans in tbc and more or less quitting end game pve while those incompetents kept baning their heads on the wall in raid content until their classes were buffed and the content nerfed. i had self professed pro pve tanks in my guild and PUGs who couldn't do something as run out of the GD bad stuff that killed you in 2 seconds in normal mode 5 mans, and saw many guilds bang their heads against karazhan while other guilds were running killing kael thas in outlands raid(not he second appearance of him) and BT.

which bring sup another point, i think zerg raid guilds will be more powerful than ever as per hte guild leveling perks and harder content goes. incompetent raiders will flock to them to be carried liek was ramapant in my experience in tbc and the old stereotypes will come back stronger than ever. while casual raiding and casual raid guilds will suffer as a result. because quite franklyi think any guild who is planning on doing casual raiding is not being honest in terms of what it takes to do even heroics let alone raids right now.

i don't know where you class yourself int eh casual-hardcore spectrum smeltn, but i'm pretty sure evn is a hardmode hardcore raider somewhere in the top percentile, and he seems to admit that the current content is pretty difcult even for his guild.

soo all that combined, plus the word on the street, tells me that regardless of the blue posts, as usual a nerf is inevitable, even if it might take longer than in the past.

There is a much higher percentile of people progressing through this first tier of content than 5%. It's not like Sunwell.. Further, the players not being able to clear the content will still be able to progress via grinding heroics and acquiring Valor Points and therefore epic gear. Albeit, this is much slower than just being "pro" to begin with. That's the point, though; there should be a penalty for not being motivated to do the right things, and not being a better player. That is the difference between Wrath and Cata.

Also, it does not take a hardcore player to be able to clear content. All it takes is a good group of people. If you're goal is to clear it first, then yes, but being hardcore (raiding every day as if a full time job) is not required to clear this content.

That is assuming Blizzard hasn't learned from what it has admitted to be mistakes. There were many bad decisions made in Wrath, which is what I'm guessing you have experience in.

naw i have more experience in tbc. and there were plenty of nerfs to content back then too.

from word of mouth of people i played with in tbc in pvp and less pve because they were frustrated by having to rely on other players who just didn;t even do the bare minimum to take down content, then changed to pve in wotlk, is wmroe of what i know of wotlk.

the only thing i personally know of wotlk is after 4.03a when wotlk content was trivial at best. and even then there were players who were getting themsleves killed on trash pulls and so on.

what i am seeing on my own server right now for qq tends to be people who go into heroics with the bare minimum gear to get in to them in their inventories and not even equipped, when it seems like you really need to farm for the best rep gear BEFORE going into heroics if you're going to PUG them.

i mean i'm hearing about tanks with like 68k hp in heroics or something(maybe i mis read that one because honestly i had like 91k hp as mage before i bought the craft gear last night), and healer qqing about going oom healing only the tank on bosses.

There is a much higher percentile of people progressing through this first tier of content than 5%. It's not like Sunwell.. Further, the players not being able to clear the content will still be able to progress via grinding heroics and acquiring Valor Points and therefore epic gear. Albeit, this is much slower than just being "pro" to begin with. That's the point, though; there should be a penalty for not being motivated to do the right things, and not being a better player. That is the difference between Wrath and Cata.

well unless you can link to a source for the higher than 5% progressing through content figure i'll have to go with what i see in /2 and my own guild and gaming sites. i doubt even 5% have gotten to actual raiding yet.

generally i agree on the concept that the best gear should go to the best player/most motivated/(no lifers) players first.

i just think that just because blizz is happy with the difficulty right now, doesn't mean there won't be a nerf in some manner down the road for current content, maybe not before new content is released but after.

just because everyone as able to progress quickly in wotlk compared to tbc doesn't mean that it will go back to tbc and before like where only the top 5% of raid groups got past the first tier or two of progression.

all that being said, i welcome pve washouts to pvp progression. sometimes people who are bad at pve are much beter at pvp, and it tends to decrease queue times when there's lots of players filling up matches(or so it seems)

^ just a correction from "what you hear" Vanilla was much much much harder than TBC and WOTLK. I quit when 25 man raids began because the sense of a guild and community around it depleted, as a hardcore vanilla raider (MC-NAXX) it took a lot more time and effort to down bosses and obtain "epic" loot, having all epics was... epic. I think what did it for me what that it needed 40 very skilled players in order to be on the edge of content (everything was eventually nerfed, now it is just released nerfed); in that those 40 people inevitably formed bonds and for me my guild had a very good sense of family among us. That more than anything kept me playing and enjoying raiding, 25 man raids, at least for me, ruined that.

I just started playing again lastnight (I hardly played wotlk), and instead of leveling my 80 warrior to 85 I've chosen to level my 66 mage to 85, it seems a lot of the changes have made the game much easier to play and understand (UI-stuff), im not sure how I feel about the spec limitations but we'll see....

yeah well time spent in a raid doesn't necessarily equal hard to me. from what i recall the world top raiding guild in vanilla got banned for trying to cut down on time spent on trash by haxing walls in raid dungeons because there was just so much trash to deal with. effort wise, really depends on the effort. if effor tmeans spending 16 hours a day 7 days a week farming between raids for consumables and repair costs, then that's not the kind of effort i appreciate personally, and i've never added that to a criteria for content to be hard in any way in any mmo prior to wow.

anyways http://wow.guildprogress.com/Cataclysm on normal modes runs out of guilds that have done all raid progress on normal modes on the first page. hardmode list is even shorter.

now these are the top guilds in world. so obviously they are loving this. i couldn't find stats for content like 5 man heroics. maybe my search terms suck.

^ just a correction from "what you hear" Vanilla was much much much harder than TBC and WOTLK. I quit when 25 man raids began because the sense of a guild and community around it depleted, as a hardcore vanilla raider (MC-NAXX) it took a lot more time and effort to down bosses and obtain "epic" loot, having all epics was... epic. I think what did it for me what that it needed 40 very skilled players in order to be on the edge of content (everything was eventually nerfed, now it is just released nerfed); in that those 40 people inevitably formed bonds and for me my guild had a very good sense of family among us. That more than anything kept me playing and enjoying raiding, 25 man raids, at least for me, ruined that.

I just started playing again lastnight (I hardly played wotlk), and instead of leveling my 80 warrior to 85 I've chosen to level my 66 mage to 85, it seems a lot of the changes have made the game much easier to play and understand (UI-stuff), im not sure how I feel about the spec limitations but we'll see....

I don't know what you remember about vanilla 40-mans, but my experience was very different. It wasn't hard to carry bad players in a 40-man, and most of the fights had pretty simple mechanics. Being in full Naxxramas gear was certainly an achievement. BWL and MC were not really hard, though. In my experience, individual lack of skill tended to show up more in ZG?because it was a smaller raid.

Well, now i'm at another dilemma. I want an alt, and for some reason the thought of playing a melee attracts me since i've never played a high level one. But at the same time i'm not sure if i would enjoy it, so i'm debating between making my warrior a PvP char, making a warlock, or making a rogue. Rogue's seem UP atm, so i'm honestly not sure.

Well, now i'm at another dilemma. I want an alt, and for some reason the thought of playing a melee attracts me since i've never played a high level one. But at the same time i'm not sure if i would enjoy it, so i'm debating between making my warrior a PvP char, making a warlock, or making a rogue. Rogue's seem UP atm, so i'm honestly not sure.

warriors seem stronger than ever in pvp right now. i fought a few last night and they were definitely the toughest fights out of the 14 i had. very hard to kite a pvp warrior as a mage now(although i was doing it wrong), and they kinda reminded me of how rogues used to be in terms of locking people down with stuns and such. probably doesn't play like that until at least 70 or 80, but it definitely was an intersting class to fight.

the two rogues we fought last night were cake walk. maybe it was the players and/or the gear they had, idk. but we also had gimpy gear so.

idk about warlocks right now. my latest experience of them in 4.03a was in wotlk heroics where one was tanking trash and pushign the group forward. although i heard just before that they were nerfed. in my previous experience they tend to be a more dificult class to play well, as they have both a pet to manage and lots of different kinds of spells with various utility(dunno if the latter has changed or not, my mage seems to have less spells to manage now), but when played well they were extremely powerful.

well unless you can link to a source for the higher than 5% progressing through content figure i'll have to go with what i see in /2 and my own guild and gaming sites. i doubt even 5% have gotten to actual raiding yet.

That is anecdotal evidence. The opinions of a few people in trade and guild hardly hold any relevance to actual statistics.

anyways http://wow.guildprogress.com/Cataclysm on normal modes runs out of guilds that have done all raid progress on normal modes on the first page. hardmode list is even shorter.

There are far more guilds to have successfully killed 12/12 than 24. Unless I am not understanding what you said, that site is clearly wrong. WoW Progress is the de facto progression statistics site.

i'm just referring to evn's post about how much he is spending per run or week or w/e it was. iirc he is going through more per week then i made getting to 85 from 80.

Evn also in a guild that competes for the top spot on his server (feel free to correct me Evn). And he's also raiding while prices are sky high. If you start raiding in January/Feb prices will already be on a slow steady decline, not to mention you can farm mats/gold to help get ya ready for raiding.

That is anecdotal evidence. The opinions of a few people in trade and guild hardly hold any relevance to actual statistics.

There are far more guilds to have successfully killed 12/12 than 24. Unless I am not understanding what you said, that site is clearly wrong. WoW Progress is the de facto progression statistics site.

you or slane said more than 5% were making good progress on current content. both your link which seems to only show hardmodes and my link which also show normal modes say otherwise. WAIT i just looked at this chart:

Blackwing Descent

Magmaw: 5676 (68.39%)

Omnotron Defense System: 6315 (76.09%)

Maloriak: 2555 (30.79%)

Atramedes: 1664 (20.05%)

Chimaeron: 1147 (13.82%)

Nefarian: 124 (1.49%)

The Bastion of Twilight

Halfus Wyrmbreaker: 5868 (70.71%)

Valiona and Theralion: 3703 (44.62%)

Ascendant Council: 1103 (13.29%)

Cho'gall: 509 (6.13%)

Throne of the Four Winds

Conclave of Wind: 3793 (45.70%)

Al'Akir: 549 (6.62%)

except i have doubt that 60% or more of guilds are actually even riading normal modes at this point. especially when the link i gave seems to give the same heroic info as your link but on normal modes runs out of 12/12 progression guilds pretty quickly.

Evn also in a guild that competes for the top spot on his server (feel free to correct me Evn). And he's also raiding while prices are sky high. If you start raiding in January/Feb prices will already be on a slow steady decline, not to mention you can farm mats/gold to help get ya ready for raiding.

that's my point. Evn has been doing a good job at giving us his progress and so far his top (on his server) guild is making slow progress. which they probably love comapred to wotlk one shots on the first night.

but it still says to me that it's silly to say current content will no be nerfed eventually. maybe not as fast in the past, but just because blizz is happy with dificulty right now, doesn't mean that at some point, maybe in a month or two or more, either before or soon after new content is released, current content won't be nerfed to allow slow pokes and lower skilled raid guilds to see cata content,a dn get prepared for new content for when it too is nerfed.

nvm that back in tbc blizz nerfed hard content so more people could see it and i seem toget the impression that people are saying current cata content is about on par in dificulty with tbc content. so why this would change(keeping in mind that iirc wotlk content was released nerfed and iirc in some cases actually made harder later).

i don't expect cata content to ever be as easy as wotlk content, just that there will be a nerf to it at some point allowing more people to see it and get gear from it.

oh anyway, if evn reads this i just want to confirm the steps for copying over wow to an ssd.

i'm thinking basically

copy wow to ssd

point shortcut to new location

verify install

make sure the game runs

delete wow from old location

does that sound right?

Everything WoW needs is in the Program Files directory. Simply pointing the shortcut to the new location will work. The registry keys created when following proper installation, however, will be incorrect. This will affect uninstallation of the game in the future and proper integration with Windows Vista/7 Game Explorer. You could just do a search of the registry and fix all appearances of it.

like a lot of qq over just how hard heroic 5 mans are right now, and raiding seems prohibitively expensive for the average raid player.

The solution to the 'cost' of consumables isn't to nerf the raid encounters because we'd still be chain-chugging them in Naxx 2.0 difficulty raids. Make the materials more plentiful or increase the yield for a given amount of materials. If we weren't trying to skip the 'intended' progression of normal -> heroic -> raid we could have done without consumables. This week we did 7/12 without the new expensive potions and did just fine. A little more gear goes a long way.

i think zerg raid guilds will be more powerful than ever as per hte guild leveling perks and harder content goes.

The rate that my guild obtains the rewards is no better than a 5-man casual guild will: if you have 5 people that play for an hour a day you will reach the guild level cap some time in late April just as every other guild does. The rewards are minor niceties - not something that makes or breaks your game play.

There is a much higher percentile of people progressing through this first tier of content than 5%. It's not like Sunwell..

That'll be true eventually, but right now the only people making serious attempts at the end-game raids is going to be the top few percent. Again, that's not because the content is impossibly hard, just that this expansion hasn't been out long enough. Eventually more people will get into the end game content but right now they're still leveling and gearing up. There's been at-most 2 'real' raid lock outs since the expansion shipped: most guilds weren't killing yogg or arthas on week one either. I think we'll have a better idea of how things are shaping up in mid January.

when it seems like you really need to farm for the best rep gear BEFORE going into heroics if you're going to PUG them.

Heroics are intended to be a 'tier above' normal mode dungeons - blue posts indicated that you're supposed to have spent some time farming 333/346 gear before you go there. It's "progression" for people who don't raid. Some players will power through content below the intended gear level but that doesn't mean you have to.

There are far more guilds to have successfully killed 12/12 than 24. Unless I am not understanding what you said, that site is clearly wrong.

As of right now there are 134 guilds that are 12/12 normal mode. Just prior to patch 4.0 there were around 3500 guilds that had killed heroic Halion and Arthas on either mode. Those made up the top 3% of all raid guilds. The number of people making progress in Bastion of Twilight or Blackwing Descent is probably throttled by people not trying yet, not by the content being too difficult.

Evn also in a guild that competes for the top spot on his server (feel free to correct me Evn).

The top guild on the server is 10/12 (one ahead of us) and has spent roughly twice as many hours raiding.

Our wipes can be blamed on:

  • 30% having the wrong strategy. We don't understand how a certain mechanic works and we just have the wrong idea about how to counter it - it causes us to wipe. We spend around 5 minutes reading over boss abilities before we go in, but don't watch videos or read guides because we suspect that most of them are 'questionable' this early in the expansion.
  • 30% disconnects. We've had major issues with people getting disconnected during combat. Critical errors, huge lag, etc. When they log back in their usually in a different instance too. There's also been some strange things with combat res not working, etc. Chalk this up to general bugginess of new content.
  • 20% playing badly. IE: for throne of the four winds our "wind guy" tank getting knocked off. People standing in fire (or out of fire), missing interrupts, hitting the wrong cool down, and generally just making mistakes playing their class.
  • 10% RNG. Sometimes a really bad combination of events happens and it feels like there's just nothing you can do about it. A change in strategy might help but usually it's a rare enough event that you just ignore it and try again.For example: a tornado spawn on a tank during elemental council and then knock him into grounding-zone right before Quake is cast.
  • 10% enrage timer. Usually when we're learning an encounter we prioritize "don't die" over "kill boss" which tends to mean lower DPS because we're focusing on learning mechanics. After we hit enrage we can usually tighten up our execution, take a few more risks, and scape out a kill in short order. I guess that could count as 'bad play' too - if you want to be less charitable.

If you ignore hardware/software bugs our failures are caused by playing badly most of the time and that seems pretty fair to me. If we played more we'd progress more but right now Christmas and final exams > video games. I suspect many of the other people not focusing on world first feel the same way. We've had 2 weeks, there's no looming content, and there are good reasons to be doing something other than playing video games right now. In the new year people will start trying end-game content and we'll see how things shape up.

If it takes 40 hours to clear all of normal mode content that's not to bad: probably on par with what it took to clear Ulduar. We've spent around 15 hours raiding so far, but I expect Neferian/Chogal/Alakir will take a fair bit of learning.

oh anyway, if evn reads this i just want to confirm the steps for copying over wow to an ssd.

Those are exactly right.

It's not unlikely that I am overestimating the number of guilds progressing as fast as we and other progression-focused guilds are.

What I genuinely find to be the most successful and positive change in this expansion is the apparent progression you describe from regular 5-mans to heroic 5-mans and then to 10- and 25-man raiding. You briefly touched on it, but what this does is create/force a more thorough experience through all of the content. In Wrath, they went to an extreme to make sure all players could experience most content. If a new player joined the scene mid-ToC, this resulted in blasting through all tiers of content by merely running heroics and jumping into the current tier.

This was in great contrast to Vanilla and BC end-game content where only the truly top players ever even stepped foot; Blizzard spent time and money on content that no one even experienced. Wrath was a huge change in concept, which resulted in an ironic shift where then most players joining mid-ToC, mid-ICC, did not experience the earlier content Blizzard spent time and money on, although not to the extreme of Vanilla/BC. In effect then, it was mildly successful.

Jump to Cataclysm, now and I think they have reached a nice medium where each jump in tier (5-man Reg -> 5-man Heroic -> Tier11, etc) mean a whole hell of a lot more while still making it perfectly doable given time to farm Valor Points for truly casual players. The real question to be answered is what will they do to allow players progression from 5-mans to raids when the next content patch hits. Will they make T11 purchasable using Justice Points and T12 Valor? That would be disappointing given what I described as the problem in Wrath.

It's not unlikely that I am overestimating the number of guilds progressing as fast as we and other progression-focused guilds are.

What I genuinely find to be the most successful and positive change in this expansion is the apparent progression you describe from regular 5-mans to heroic 5-mans and then to 10- and 25-man raiding. You briefly touched on it, but what this does is create/force a more thorough experience through all of the content. In Wrath, they went to an extreme to make sure all players could experience most content. If a new player joined the scene mid-ToC, this resulted in blasting through all tiers of content by merely running heroics and jumping into the current tier.

This was in great contrast to Vanilla and BC end-game content where only the truly top players ever even stepped foot; Blizzard spent time and money on content that no one even experienced. Wrath was a huge change in concept, which resulted in an ironic shift where then most players joining mid-ToC, mid-ICC, did not experience the earlier content Blizzard spent time and money on, although not to the extreme of Vanilla/BC. In effect then, it was mildly successful.

Jump to Cataclysm, now and I think they have reached a nice medium where each jump in tier (5-man Reg -> 5-man Heroic -> Tier11, etc) mean a whole hell of a lot more while still making it perfectly doable given time to farm Valor Points for truly casual players. The real question to be answered is what will they do to allow players progression from 5-mans to raids when the next content patch hits. Will they make T11 purchasable using Justice Points and T12 Valor? That would be disappointing given what I described as the problem in Wrath.

All current Valor Points equipment becomes purchasable with Justice points when the next tier is released. Blizzard has already stated that. While on one hand I'm fine with it, people should be focusing on current content because you don't want to end up in a guild that was working on Hydross and A'lar while other guilds were working on Illidian. At the same time, you end up feeling jipped because of all the work you put into the game. I'm more than fine with people being able to run heroics and use JP to jump into new content as long as making encounters overly easy isn't the comprise.

Looking forward to starting raiding. Looks like normal content stuff will provide a challenge to everyone, the extent of that challenge would be factor to skill and preparation and heroics look like they'll be real challenging and require A games for everyone. Still a tad bit earlier to tell, but that's what I'm hoping.

Finally got my Last heroic upgrade to notch my average item level to 346. As a sv hunter I do find my Damage/DPS leaps and bounds above other classes, in certain randoms I am doing 52% of overall damage (not aoe!) Even with like minded players with similar gear I am edging them out by arond 10-15% in damage done.

Enjoying the difficulty however not liking the Tank and Healer shortage in the guild at the moment, progression its non existent at the moment, we have players that can easily kill a few bosses off I would assume we were even over geared for some of the encounters, the only problem is we can never assemble a full team to Raid :(

Finally got my Last heroic upgrade to notch my average item level to 346. As a sv hunter I do find my Damage/DPS leaps and bounds above other classes, in certain randoms I am doing 52% of overall damage (not aoe!) Even with like minded players with similar gear I am edging them out by arond 10-15% in damage done.

Enjoying the difficulty however not liking the Tank and Healer shortage in the guild at the moment, progression its non existent at the moment, we have players that can easily kill a few bosses off I would assume we were even over geared for some of the encounters, the only problem is we can never assemble a full team to Raid :(

:(

We have our first one scheduled for the 27th of December, I gave up raiding when ToC came out and I told my guild I was only a backup once cata came out but it turns out most of their healers don't want to heal because of the difficulty so I've been asked to go. I really don't understand it to be honest, me and a group of 4 friends are getting the heroics done now in about the same time the wrath ones took us and healing is just as easy when you get some decent gear.

Oh well Blackwing Descent here I come.

Tanked last 2 boss's of Heroic Tolvir last night, the tank we had didnt want to move the shadow phoenix, so melee rance shadows ended up causing a wipe,,, so i put on my tank gear ( ALOT better quality then my dps gear ) beat it first attempt, as well as final boss.

I hate tanking pugs, Due to the other players attitudes, but love tanking in general, and will always volunteer for guildies

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    • The Light of Life? We actually do glow till our Death, study finds by Sayan Sen Image by Rafael Rendon via Pexels A study by researchers at the University of Calgary has found that living organisms produce an extremely faint light known as ultraweak photon emission, and that this glow appears to drop significantly after death. The research was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry in April 2025 and quickly drew widespread attention, leading to more than 200 news stories about the findings. Ultraweak photon emission (or UPE), sometimes called biophoton emission, refers to tiny amounts of light released by living cells as a result of normal biological activity. A photon is the basic particle of light, and researchers say every living system examined so far, including plants and animals, has been found to emit these photons. The glow is far too faint to be seen by the human eye. “I suppose it has a little to do with people being reminded of auras,” says Dr. Christoph Simon, PhD, one of the authors of the study and a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Faculty of Science. “It is a fact that living beings glow. It’s a very weak glow, but it’s there and visible with very sensitive cameras.” According to the study, the light involved is extremely weak, ranging from 10 to 1,000 photons per square centimetre per second across a spectral range of 200 to 1,000 nanometres. For comparison, a nanometre is one-billionth of a metre and is commonly used to measure wavelengths of light. Detecting emissions at such low levels requires highly specialized equipment. To study the phenomenon, researchers used electron-multiplying charge-coupled device (EMCCD) and charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras. These imaging systems are designed to detect extremely small amounts of light, including individual photons, while minimizing background noise. The technology allowed researchers to capture signals that would otherwise be impossible to observe. The team worked with the Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in Ottawa to examine photon emissions in mice. Researchers took two-hour exposure images of the animals before and after death and compared the results. “We saw that the level of light that they emit – this biophoton glow – is distinctly different between living and dead animals,” says Dr. Daniel Oblak, PhD, an associate professor in Physics and Astronomy and the corresponding author of the study. The images showed a clear decrease in photon emissions after death across the entire body of each mouse. According to the researchers, this provided direct evidence that living and dead tissue produce different levels of ultraweak photon emission. “It’s a very small amount and it’s, of course, very tricky to detect,” Oblak says. The study grew out of discussions between Simon, whose research interests include quantum biology, and Oblak, whose work focuses on detecting light for quantum communication experiments. Quantum biology is a field that explores whether processes described by quantum physics, which studies matter and energy at very small scales, may also play a role in living systems. “Since I work as a quantum physicist on light detection for quantum communication, I thought that experimentally we have a lot of the tools to be able to detect the light,” Oblak explains. The researchers also investigated UPE in plants and found that the light changed in response to stress. When plants were exposed to higher temperatures or physically injured, their photon emissions increased. Chemical treatments also affected the glow. Among the substances tested, the local anesthetic benzocaine produced the strongest emission response when applied to injured plant tissue. These findings suggest that ultraweak photon emission is closely linked to biochemical and metabolic activity inside living organisms. Metabolism refers to the chemical reactions that allow cells and organisms to stay alive and function. Because these reactions change when an organism experiences stress, injury or disease, researchers believe UPE may provide a way to monitor those changes. The researchers stress that the glow is a physical and biological phenomenon, not a metaphysical one. Oblak says more research is needed to understand exactly how the light is produced and what information it may reveal about the condition of living tissue. “We must understand what that is to figure out what’s happening,” he says. “If we can understand how that relates to certain influences on the body – stress, diseases – then that could be used as a diagnostic tool.” The researchers believe the technique could eventually help scientists study health and disease without invasive procedures. Because UPE can be measured without adding dyes, markers or labels, it may offer a way to monitor whether tissue is healthy, damaged or alive. In plants, it could help researchers better understand how organisms respond to injury, heat and other forms of stress. While the work is still in its early stages, the study demonstrates that ultraweak photon emission imaging can provide a non-invasive and label-free way to observe biological activity. Researchers say the approach could become a useful tool for studying vitality, stress responses and other important processes in both animals and plants. Source: University of Calgary, ACS publication This article was generated with some help from AI and reviewed by an editor. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, this material is used for the purpose of news reporting. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.
    • Damn, I loved this show back in the day.  
    • Rufus 4.15.2393 Beta 2 by Razvan Serea Rufus is a small utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc. Despite its small size, Rufus provides everything you need! Oh, and Rufus is fast. For instance it's about twice as fast as UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer or Windows 7 USB download tool, on the creation of a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO (with honorable mention to WiNToBootic for managing to keep up). It is also marginally faster on the creation of Linux bootable USBs from ISOs. A non-exhaustive list of Rufus supported ISOs is available here. It can be especially useful for cases where: you need to create USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, UEFI, etc.) you need to work on a system that doesn't have an OS installed you need to flash a BIOS or other firmware from DOS you want to run a low-level utility Rufus 4.15.2393 Beta 2 changelog: Add RISC-V 64 support to UEFI:NTFS Improve the guards for using the "silent" option Improve the ability to cancel during write retries Improve progress reporting for compressed image extraction Fix unrestricted XML entity expansion and integer overflow in ezxml parser (courtesy of @esadowski4) [GHSA-55r2-34wg-8mv9] Fix "silent" Windows installation failing at 75% in most cases [#2960] Fix a crash during boot when using UEFI:NTFS on Snapdragon X based ARM64 platforms [#2934] Fix the first WUE option always being checked by default [#2965] Fix an infinite loop when using Windows ISOs that contain multiple WIMs Fix "Enable runtime UEFI media validation" checkbox not always being properly enabled Other WUE improvements/fixes for OneDrive removal and username validation (with thanks to @christian8641) [#2984, #2991] Download: Rufus 4.15 Beta 2 | 1.9 MB (Open Source) Links: Rufus Home Page | Project Page @GitHub | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • Tixati 3.43 by Razvan Serea Tixati is a free and easy to use BitTorrent client featuring detailed views of all seed, peer, and file transfer properties. Also included are powerful bandwidth charting and throttling capabilities, and a full DHT implementation. Tixati is one of the most advanced and flexible BitTorrent clients available. And unlike many other clients, Tixati contains NO SPYWARE, NO ADS, and NO GIMMICKS. Tixati portable version is meant to run on a USB flash drive or other portable media. It stores all its configuration files in the same folder as the executable binary files, and all file paths are stored in a format relative to the program executable folder. It is important you do not delete the "tixati_portable_mode.txt" file within the executables folder. This file is what triggers Tixati to run in portable mode. (The executable binaries are actually the same as the standard edition binaries.) When running the portable edition from a USB flash drive, especially one that is formatted in FAT16/FAT32, you may experience some lag when initially loading a new transfer. This is because initializing and allocating large files on flash-based media consumes a greater amount of time and resources compared to a conventional hard-drive. Tixati has the following features: detailed views of all aspects of the swarm, including peers, pieces, files, and trackers support for magnet links, so no need to download .torrent files if a simple magnet-link is available super-efficient peer choking/unchoking algorithms ensure the fastest downloads peer connection encryption for added security full DHT (Distributed Hash Table) implementation for trackerless torrents, including detailed message traffic graphs and customizable event logging advanced bandwidth charting of overall traffic and per-transfer traffic, with separate classification of protocol and file bytes, and with separate classification of outbound traffic for trading and seeding highly flexible bandwidth throttling, including trading/seeding proportion adjustment and adjustable priority for individual transfers and peers bitfield graphs that show the completeness of all downloaded files, what pieces other peers have available, and the health of the overall swarm customizable event logging for each download, and individual event logs for all peers within the swarm expert local file management functions which allow you to move files to a different partition even while downloading is still in progress 100% compatible with the BitTorrent protocol Windows and Linux-GTK native versions available Tixati 3.43 changelog: Several major DHT improvements Added several screening heuristics to filter malicious DHT nodes, prevent Sybil floods Rewrote DHT search algorithms to add support for multi-path lookups Improved DHT logging, more details in several error messages Extended timeout lengths for outgoing queries over I2P Added incoming query / response per second to DHT table status display Updated Regex engine to PCRE2 Faster Search function, scans channel user profiles in much less time Fixed problems with file name parsing and date handling in RSS Faster and more accurate RSS filtering and episode number detection Several optimizations to global text processing functions, such as UTF-8 cleaning, line splitting, and token parsing Complete update of port-mapping UPNP/NAT-PMP engine, added PCP support, mapping over VPN support, and more Several refinements to default gateway detection on Windows / Android, which is used for port-mapping Support for IPv6 interface-scoped addresses, which is sometimes needed for IPv6 gateway detection and port mapping Full support for PCP port remapping, added backup zero-port query in case requested port is rejected New UPNP/NAT-PMP Monitor in Help > Diagnostics New reflected local port/location tracker that analyzes DHT replies to detect true port/location and NAT mapping type New TCP/UDP Ports monitor in Help > Diagnostics, with several statistic and information tabs, and a detailed event log Calculated/reflected local port is now used for port parameter in tracker queries and peer handshake Fixed several problems with Linux Wayland compatibility Completely replaced tray icon functions in Linux, new SNI implementation is now the default with GSI backup Implemented full DBus-Menu server to be used by new SNI tray icon implementation Replaced Linux tray balloon notification DBus client Rewrote auto-shutdown DBus interface for Linux Rewrote sleep inhibit DBus interface for Linux Dropped deprecated Linux dbus-glib dependencies Completely new Windows asynchronous file handling, now using IOCP model with several block-alignment optimizations Better handling of system network resets and interface down/up cycles Added option to fully clear configuration in Settings > Import/Export Remember last option checkboxes when using Import/Export Fixed minor I2P incoming connection routing problems Much faster I2P vanity host name finder Much faster channel user vanity key finder Raised length limit for torrent tracker remote failure messages to 120 from 64 Fixed problems setting download location on a torrent before the meta info is resolved Added location/MOC paths to category pane tooltips Several minor Web Interface fixes Refinements to static and scrolling ellipsizing layout routines Several fixes and improvements to single and multi-line text edit controls Many other minor fixes throughout the user interface A major overhaul of the Android framework has also been done: API target raised to 35, page alignment set to 16K Rewrote all inset processing routines Full rewrite of foreground service, application, and main activity objects New permission request routines Added multi-cast lock request before UPNP/LPDP discovery operations Fixed file permission and locking problems when loading .torrent from web browsers Fixed problems with Z-ordering of modal / non-modal and popup windows Fixed handling of back gesture on newer OS Added status bar icon adjustment based on status bar background color Added option in Settings > UI > Behavior to continue running in tray when task removed from recents App can be closed by swiping away notification Rewrote IME interface, fixed several problems with auto-correct, on-screen keyboard visibility, and cursor positioning Added full support for Android hardware mouse and keyboard function Added full tooltip implementation for Android hovering via mouse or other cursor device Full rewrite of popup menu widgets to better support hardware pointers and keyboard Added mouse cursor updating framework for Android hovering Added Settings > Import/Export to Android builds Added language file support to Android builds Download: Tixati 64-bit | Tixati 32-bit ~20.0 MB (Freeware) Download: Portable Tixati 3.43 | 114.0 MB Download: Tixati 3.43 for Linux | Android View: Tixati Website | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • Firefox 152.0.1 by Razvan Serea Firefox is a fast, full-featured Web browser. It offers great security, privacy, and protection against viruses, spyware, malware, and it can also easily block pop-up windows. The key features that have made Firefox so popular are the simple and effective UI, browser speed and strong security capabilities. Firefox has complete features for browsing the Internet. It is very reliable and flexible due to its implemented security features, along with customization options. Firefox includes pop-up blocking, tab-browsing, integrated Google search, simplified privacy controls, a streamlined browser window that shows you more of the page than any other browser and a number of additional features that work with you to help you get the most out of your time online. Firefox key features Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) – Blocks trackers, cookies, cryptominers, and fingerprinters by default. Private Browsing Mode – Deletes history, cookies, and temporary files when closed. Lightweight & Fast Performance – Optimized memory usage with efficient page loading. Cross-Platform Sync – Sync bookmarks, passwords, history, and open tabs across devices. Customizable Interface – Toolbars, themes, and extensions can be tailored to user needs. Strong Privacy Controls – Options to manage cookies, permissions, and site data easily. Reader Mode – Strips away clutter for distraction-free reading. Pocket Integration – Save and read articles offline with Pocket built into Firefox. Picture-in-Picture (PiP) – Watch videos in a floating window while multitasking. Extensions & Add-ons – Vast library for productivity, security, and personalization. Built-in PDF Viewer – No need for external software to view PDFs. Firefox Monitor – Alerts users if their email is part of a known data breach. Multi-Account Containers – Isolate browsing sessions (e.g., work, personal, shopping). Performance & Resource Efficiency – Uses fewer system resources than some competitors. Open Source & Community-Driven – Transparent development with global contributions. Firefox 152.0.1 fixes: Fixed frequent crashes affecting users with Intel Raptor Lake processors. (Bug 2039575) Fixed an issue on macOS where choosing a PDF option, such as "Save as PDF", from the system print dialog would send the job to your printer instead of saving a file. (Bug 2047850) Download: Firefox 64-bit | Firefox 32-bit | ARM64 | ~70.0 MB (Freeware) Download: Firefox for MacOS | 146.0 MB View: Firefox Home Page | Release Notes Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
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