Hope you yanks had a good weekend. I was trying to get my Rogue to level 70 on Monday so I could get some arena points before reset so that's why this one is late.

Also, this week is really slow for news.

PvP Season 2 beginning on June 12th

Yay I get my drake in two weeks. Also, new Arena and epic Honour gear so us dirty PvPers can get even better epics at a fraction of the time investment of raiders.

• EJ Discussion Thread

Nihilum, and some other guys, go on a PvE rampage

So they've killed the first three bosses of Black Temple (Naj'entus, Supremus, Teron Gorefiend...us) and also the first three bosses of Hyjal. The Black Temple kills and Prince Kael'thas were world firsts. The Hyjal first kills were done by Forte and Curse.

I find it greatly amusing that Hyjal is almost cleared in the first week of the patch. I guess we'll be expecting a new expansion for the holiday season?

• Nihilum website
• World of Raids main page - Because there are way too many posts to individually link to.

Blizzard does not care about black people gold farmers

peons4hire got sued, so a whole bunch of other companies are taking their place. For some reason I don't think this really got us anywhere. It's not like gold is that hard to get nowadays anyhow.

• EJ Discussion Thread

I hate slow news weeks

I have 50 gold that the season 1 Gladiator Items show up as honor purchasable on the 12th.

I think everyone is overreacting about 4 Hyjal bosses being dead already. Curse gets the only kill on the 4th boss, and Nihilum and Curse get kills on the 3rd. Seeing as these two guilds had GM-free kills of half of Black Temple and these everything pre-Archimonde in Hyjal, it's probably a little premature to write Hyjal off as easy and assume the content won't last very long. I think they may have gone a little overkill on PTR testing this go around. They should probably have just spawned the bosses and made sure abilities worked and deathtouched them or despawned them, instead of having Curse and Nihilum go in there and work on them constantly like they did. Then again, I don't know if I'd prefer *almost* perfectly tuned bosses and more 'fair' progression, or perfectly tuned bosses and 2-3 guilds that Blizzard should really pay to be their official testers farming the instances before anyone else even darkens the door of the instances.

Based on everything that has been said for the past several months about how bad SSC and TK were due to lack of testing, how Gruul and Mag were mistuned etc., I think it is safe to say having vastly better tuned encounters at the expense of Nihilium getting Tier 6 early is worth it. Especially now that PvP Gear is better for PvP then PvE gear, there is no disadvantage to the guilds that are a tier behind Nihilium, since content is instanced.

Basically the early TBC content was tuned for the very best, using full consumables etc, with the same 25 every night, while there are 5-10 guilds that can do that, most can't and don't really want to, and as a result just said "no thanks" to a lot of the raid instances pre-2.1. Now that they retuned the encounters and the future ones... yeah they are easy for a guild like Nihilium, but for the rest of us... not so much. I would rather have content that is doable with practice, proper execution and reasonable consumables then have it tuned to be a challenge for 5-10 guilds and impossible for the other 100,000 guilds out there.

All-in-all I would rather have a realistic shot at clearing BT before the expansion, then have Blizzard cock-block the instance to keep everyone closer together... will Curse/Nihilium/D&T clear BT by the end of summer... probably... will more then 2-3 guilds on most servers clear it before the fall... probably not.

I'm not really sure what Blizzard could have done differently. These boards (let alone the official forums) were absolutely up in arms about how poorly public testing of raids was done in TBC beta. You could argue that they overcompensated in 2.1, but I don't really agree. By all accounts, there are still bugs in several of the later encounters (adds evade bugging on Vashj, corpse despawning on Curse's Hyjal kill, only one BT attunement item dropping), even with the extensive testing.

I guess one interesting option would be to contract with a guild or two, have everyone sign an NDA and maybe get some token amount of (real world) cash in return for access to "Uber New Raid Instance #8". Blizzard would get decent test coverage, and presumably the threat of lawsuits would keep leaks to a minimum. I can already imagine the cries of outrage on the WoW forums, though. "Bliz favors Death and Taxes! Their PTR experience is the only reason they killed Boss X! We almost have Zul'Farrak on farm and woulda been first if not for this SLAP IN THE FACE!"

What's the worst thing that'll happen? Nihilum kills Illidian in July, gets bored and quits in September? The gaming universe isn't going to come to an end over that, for sure.

But then what would Teza post about all day? (BTW, does anyone find it hilarious that she calls herself a "WoW Reporter"?)

It's approximately as funny as how serious Ming is on his blog. Every time I venture by there I find myself saying "WTF, Ming?!?" after one his elaborate/bizarre/preposterous analogies.

As far as BT/Hyjal go, I'm happy to see that the encounters are tuned and that the best raiding groups in the world are taking down the encounters. That gives me hope that I may someday see that content without spending 40 hours a week raiding to do it.

I felt special for having to google that name.

I had to Google it too.

No its the emo chick with the "rogues do it from behind" shirt on. She has the image up all over the site.

Edit - This one.