If you're a raiding healer, chances are you use or at least have heard of Grid, the popular raid frame mod. It makes the essential task of staring at health bars significantly easier. However, Grid is a darn complicated mod. So complicated, in fact, that Llyra over at Healing Way has written a blog post all about how to configure it.

This one's by request this week -- Twitter's own @Random_Tangent recommended it to us. We've done a few Ulduar items lately (we'll have to go phat next week), but here's another nice one.

Name: Stormedge (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)
Type: Epic Two-hand Axe
Damage/Speed: 594 - 892 / 3.50 (212.3 DPS)
Abilities:

• Um, it's badass?
• +106 Strength, +125 Stamina. Which means this is a straight-up 2h DPS weapon -- the Strength adds a huge damage bonus to Warriors, Death Knights, Feral Druids, and Paladins by giving them a +212 attack power just from the weapon alone, not to mention other places Strength is used. Shamans also get a buff -- not quite as big, but still nice.

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Lotonero got his thread locked because he posted it in the wrong forum, but he makes an interesting point: rez sickness costs are higher than ever. Death costs are already pretty high -- when you're dressed in greens and blues it's not much of a problem, but get yourself down to red on some high-level epics, and see if you don't wince when you hit up the repair vendor to pay the piper. But rez sickness costs are even worse -- they affect durability on all of your items, even those you're not wearing, and so when a dual-specced healer or tank with two or even three sets of gear goes rez-sick, the amount they have to pay goes through the roof.

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Update: This promotion seems to be US only. Sorry, rest of the world. Hopefully you guys will get something like this soon as well. China had a Coke promo, so maybe the EU/Oceania will get a turn sooner or later.

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Just a day before the first batch of ticket sales for BlizzCon happens, Blizzard has announced the time the ticket sale will begin:

10:00 a.m. PDT tomorrow.

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This isn't exactly shocking news (this just in: Blizzard has an advertising budget!) but it is worth noting: Mark C. was watching the NBA playoffs the other day and lo and behold, guess which familiar logo appeared during a halftime sponsorship. Apparently the announcer even read off the name of the game during a tag. I don't think Mark is exactly right about it being one of the "first non-sports games being advertised in a sporting event" (I'm pretty sure I've seen one of those Killzone 2 or Call of Duty spots during my Cubs games lately), but it's the first time we've seen WoW promoted outside of the usual TV spots.

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As I mentioned last week, they're hotfixing Lightning Overload: The chance for the Lightning Overload talent to be triggered is being increased from 7/13/20% to 11/22/33%. The reason this change is going live is a little more confusing. It's going live because elemental shaman DPS is low, but the developers can find no reason for it.

I find this interesting because it's illustrative of the complexity of the game itself and also of the elemental shaman and the way the class interacts with others for its damage potential. We can assume that the damage loss moving from Naxxramas to Ulduar is real, because the developers are already hotfixing a change to compensate for it (something they have not done for other classes that have demonstrated DPS loss in Ulduar) and so we're left with something of a mystery. Why is elemental shaman DPS decreasing since patch 3.1?

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It's been rumored already, but now we've got Blizzard confirmation: the cost of the Argent Hippogryph (obtained as a final reward from the Argent Tournament) will be lowered in "the next minor patch" to 150 Champion's Seals. We don't know exactly when ("next minor patch" could be 3.1.2, or possibly a quick hotfix before then), but Blizzard is for sure lowering the price.

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Kinless Chronicles talks about something I think Blizzard has done exceptionally well with the latest expansion: "equalized content." Their story is about taking control of a Blightblood to finish off Drakuru, but there are countless examples of this in Northrend, from the last fight of Drak'theron to the encounter in Eye of Eternity with Malygos. World of Warcraft (and MMOs in general) has always been about levels and gear -- get better gear or level up, and you can cast more spells, swing an axe harder, and move on to more epic encounters. But Blizzard's "equalizing content" means that gear isn't always an issue -- by putting you in control of something else, whether that be a mind-controlled Troll or a siege vehicle, you can have extremely epic encounters without worrying about whether you're powerful enough for them or not. The limiter becomes not gear but skill (and/or the knowledge of how to use those skills).

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You want tickets to BlizzCon 2009?

You want to enter the queue to purchase them tomorrow?

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Who loves hot fixes?

I do! I do!

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Okay, I need help with this one. Waus from Trollbane sent Why you should never eat a brownie in to us. As the story goes, Waus was eating a brownie when he suffered from a collapsed lung. While in the hospital recuperating, he was inspired to create this machinima. I don't know what to make of this video, so I'm curious what the legion of Moviewatchers think about it.

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BlizzCon tickets will be going on sale tomorrow, Saturday May 16th. While no specific time has been announced when they go on sale, there has been some conjecture. But it should be taken with a very small grain of salt.

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Larisa's got a good rant about something I've considered before in a slightly different context: players aren't very good at anticipating how temporary game changes will work out. We, as a group (not individually necessarily), are quite quick to judgment when we see changes to the game, and the word Larisa uses is "conservatism" -- she notes the examples of the reaction to the zombie outbreak and the Children's Week batleground issues, and says that players "tossed the gift away, like spoiled kids." We (again, in general, not you specifically) have a very short view of how temporary changes will affect the game, lambast Blizzard for changing what didn't need to be changed, and very often, when the dust settles and the zombies are gone or the event is over, we realize that it wasn't so bad after all.

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Since you all liked our last massive UI glitch shot so much, I thought I'd throw up another one we recently received. Solitary of <Cerberus> on Ravenholdt-EU sent in this screenshot from a very different Tirisfal Glades. "I particularly like how my character's face has been used as the texture for her shoulder," she writes. "And the sky writing is just bizarre ... maybe that pesky Orphan slipped some pills in my drink."

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I'm impressed with the way they've expanded on fishing in Wrath of the Lich King, especially with the new fishing dailies and the other changes that came to my favorite secondary profession in patch 3.1. My biggest gripe is that the Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat still evades me. The fishing gods even went so far as to taunt me with a Battered Jungle Hat last time I turned in the daily. That's just not cool, man. Not cool.

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Argent Hippogryph Cost Update
Quote from: Crygil (Source)In order to better balance the cost of new rewards that we would like to add to the Argent Tournament, we will be changing the cost of the Argent Hippogryph flying mount in the next minor patch. These mounts will be reduced in cost from 250 Champion’s Seals to 150 Champion’s Seals. Further details regarding additional new rewards will be provided in the future.

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Since our initial post regarding the Book of Glyph Mastery we’ve been tracking the item very closely. As we predicted in that post, this item experienced a price plummet that was both fast and sharp. As regular readers know, we are not fans of speculation or conjecture so we’ll let the data tell the story.

4 Week High: 5344 on Monday, April 20, 2009
4 Week Low: 237 on Tuesday, May 5, 2009

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