The first annual Nordlys Pet Battle Tournament

At the end of November 2012 Nordlys invites all members to participate in an epic tournament with amazing prizes.

Precise date and rules will follow, but for now you might want to know what to prepare for:

Tournament Form: Group stage followed by finals. Depending on number of participants, we will decide numbers in the groups, seedings, and final stages.

Pet quality: All pets are alowed - from common to epic. From level 1 to level 25 (level one pets might not go far though).

Pet numbers: Each contestant can only bring 3 pets. These must be named and will be fighting in all the contestants matches.

Stable master: We will be holding the tournament next to a stable master so pets can be healed and revieved between matches.

Players announcing their final line up in advance in the comments below, will get a small bonus prize.

Raidleader Weekly: Energy and Overload on The Stone Guard

After our first night on Stone Guard it is clear that several people, are still not crystal clear on exactly how the energy/overload mechanic work and how the tanks are supposed to deal with it. I'll therefore take this Raidleader weekly and try to explain it in clear detail. There will be a lot of pictures in this post and I appologise in advance for my dreadful MS Paint skills.

First a few facts

• A Guardian gains energy whenever it stands within 12 yards of at least one of it's companion Guardians.
• Gained energy will not decay over time.
• Upon reaching 100 energy, a Guardian will cast Overload, dealing 200k+ raid damage, resetting it's energy to zero, and interrupting Pertrification if it's currently casting it.
• The same Guardian cannot cast Petrification twice in a row.

And now for the actual mechanic

Lets take a look at the setup right after a pull:

 

Two tanks (black diamonds), one holding two Guards (colored circles) and one holding one. Initially, all three are at zero energy. After the pull, one Guard will begin to cast petrification - we'll mark this one with a star - and the two next to each other will begin to gain energy - marked by a right-pointing arrow on the energy bar:

This state will be held until both Guards on the right side is at 50 energy. At this point, the tanks swap the two non-petrifying Guards (Cobalt and Amethyst in this case):

 

Now, the Cobalt Guard at 50 energy is alone and stop gain energy, whilst the Amethyst at zero energy is now together with the petrifying Jasper and will start to gain energy. This state will be held until the Jasper Guard reaches 100 energy and overloads, thus interupting Petrification and resetting it's energy. At the same time, the Amethyst Guard should now be at 50 energy:

Because the raid takes 90% reduced magic damage from the currently petrifying Guard, the 225k overload blast, should hit for a mere 22k, which is much more manageable. Hence, it is crucial that only the currently petrifying Guard ever overloads. 

Now, one of two things can happen: Either the Amethyst Guard starts to Petrify, which is trivial: The tanks will just hold the positions until the next overload. Or the Cobalt Guard will start to petrify, which require a quick response from the tanks: They should immidiately swap the Cobalt and the Amethyst:

 

In general: Whenever the lone Guard start to Petrify, the tanks swap that and that of the other two that has the highest energy. This, I think was one of the crucial points that didn't work out too well during Sunday's raid.

Introducing Readleader Weekly: Keyboard turning and Clicking

Now that we've gotten our very own blog site in Nordlys, I though I'd put it to good use by starting a - mostly - weekly coloumn about my perspective as a Raider and Raidleader on  topics related to our guild, our raiding activities and World of Warcraft in general.

I'd like to kick-off this coloumn by discussing Clicking and Keyboard turning, why they are sub-optimal and how to move on to mouse turning and keybindings. First a clarification: If you are a Clicker and/or Keyboard turner, this post is in no way meant to berate you or your skills as a player. I can fully appriciate where you are coming from, as I too was both clicker and keyboard turner once. Instead it is meant as an inspiration to you and show you how you can become even better.

That keyboard turning and clicking is sub-optimal is really not to be contested, is seems logical enough: It taskes longer to turn with the keyboard than it does with the mouse, and so it takes longer to eg. dodge a GTFO-mechanic and get back into proper position. Likewise, clicking requires more attention on the actionbar when moving the mouse to the right ability which diverts attention from what goes on at the game screen.

User Interface and it's faults in Clicking and Keyboard turning

I'm not surpriced that a great many players become Clickers and Keyboard turners. In fact I think it is inevitable given the default WoW UI and keybindings: WASD are bound to forward/backward/turnleft/turnright and your very first action bar are bound to 1 through 0. This is an absolutely horrid layout, because as soon as you get your fifth new ability, you can't reach the keybind without moving your hand off WASD. As a result, many players either start to click the action bar or take the right hand off the mouse and use that to press keybinds. In either case, keyboard turning is now the norm.

To make effective use of keybinds takes a radically different approach to UI. I had that epiphany in 2009 while killing trolls in Grizzly Hills as a level 73 mage. Yes, I was a clicker and keyboard turner until mid-Wrath, at which point I had already done raiding in Naxxramas and Ulduar.

Before we move on, let me show you how I design my action bars with keybindings in mind. I have both a Razer Naga MMO mouse and a Logitch G13 game pad, so I may have more buttons avaible than most, but the point I want to illustrate remains the same.

These are my action bars and the colored lines show which keys are bound where. Notice how the action bars mimic the relative position of the buttons on my periphirals. This is a great help because you can then find the corret button from visual reference on your game screen alone, which makes keybindings much easier to adapt to.

The basics of bindings

To get started with keybinds, place your hands on your desired movement keys (which need not necessarely be WASD - ESDF work fine too) and your mouse, respectively (we refer to this as the default position). How many keys can you reach without moving your hands from these postions? Remember any extra buttons on your mouse, which most mice have nowadays. This will be your pool of potential keybinds. Now make a list of your combat essential abilities, in order of most frequent usage.

You may or may not invest some time in setting up your actionbars with position mimicing like I've done. I strongly recommend it,  but if you are confident that you can keep track of your binds without it, feel free. Now start to bind your abilities, starting with those you use the most closest to your default position and working your way outwards.

Once you've got all your binds filled, you're ready to start using them. At this point you can still keyboard turn and click if you wish, and it may be beneficial to take a few days to let your new UI sink in if you've made any major changes. Once you feel you are ready for the final plunge, read on.

How to get veaned from Clicking and Keyboard turning

Old habbits die hard and if you has been a clicker/keyboard turner for any extended period of time, chances are you'll find it tough to not do it. There is a very effective way however, but it will take hours or even days, and during this time, your game performance will be very sub-par, so you should not do it if you have any major ingame events like raids, dungeons or battlegrounds planned in any immidiate future; Set aside some free in-game time, promise yourself: "I'm gonna do this now", and type /dnd.

The idea is to deprive yourself of the means to click and keyboard turn. In case of turning this is easy: Go to the keybindings menu and unbind all keys from turning. All of them. Only have strafe bound. Clicking is a little tricky, but most action bar addons provide a "click-through" option. Here, Bartender4

This option basically make the entire actionbar unclickable. Enable this to make sure clicking on actionbar buttons will have no effect.


What happens now will feel extremely akward and even fustrating at times and you'll be tempted promtly go and re-bind your old turning keys and disable click-through. It's important that you stick to it: Run around in Elwynn Forest until you feel comfortable with consistently turning with your mouse. Try and kill a few spiders and Defias goons. Then up the stress level a bit and go do your dailies. Again you will find it akward and fustrating, but still stick to it. After a while it will begin to sink in. You may also find that your keybinds are not axactly optimal in regards to which abilities you use when. This is also to be expected, setting up keybindings is often an iterative process.

Advanced tricks: Macros and Modifiers

There are several tricks one can use to get even more binds out of a limited number of keys. The most important of these are macros with modifiers. I'll probably do a more in-depth post on macros at a later time, but for now, let me just show you a basic but very useful template:

#showtooltip
/cast [mod] <spell1>; <spell2>

This will cast spell1 if any of the modifer keys (crtl, shift or alt) is held down while the bind is pressed, and cast spell2 otherwise. Now you in principle have doubled the number of binds you have available. You can also specify the modifier, eg.

/cast [mod:shift]

Now the modifier will only test true if shift is held, but not if crtl or alt is held. This means you can have up to 4 spells on a single bind if needed:

#showtooltip
/cast [mod:shift] <spell1>; [mod:ctrl] <spell2>; [mod:alt] <spell3>; <spell4>

Bar-addons like bartender also have a feature called Paging; this allows you to change an entire action bar when holding down a modifier key, eliminating the need to create macros for all abilities. 


This should get you started on your path to become a keybinder should you wish to undertake it. I'd once again like to emphasise that it is a process that takes time. Do not be discouraged if you find your game completely unplayable for the first couple of days after you've made the change. I surely did.  Have patience and you'll get there, and once you do, you'll never look back.

How to get exalted with the Lorewalkers

If you follow this simple guide discovered by Nuthriel you can get your flying dics in under an hour

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3KzbWY4zFk

Running together

As you can see, We are arranging dungeon-runs together from September 25th.

Signup in the in-game claendar and discover Pandaria in Guild Groups.

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We will strive to keep people updated about progression in Pandaria and beyond.