BWL Raid Live Blog Pre-Blog
by 
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with As some of you know, I play a game called World of Warcraft. In the interest of providing entertaining and interesting content to you, our readers, I will be live-blogging a Blackwing Lair Raid on Saturday. I’m sure most of you have no idea what that means, so I’ll try to cover as much of the basics as possible so you won’t be totally lost. If I miss anything or you’re still confused, please ask in the comments. Hopefully I’ll be able to explain to all you non-WoW players what actually playing the game at a high level is like.
When: April 15th, 7pm EDT
Where: AlwaysBeta.
What: Embedded reporting at its finest.
Why: You have a better idea?
I play a Human Paladin on the Warsong server. You can check out an online version of my profile here.
The basic idea behind a “raid” is that to do the high-end content (i.e. the “dungeons” or “instances”) in the game you need to get a group of 40 people together. To do this we schedule raids a few days ahead of time and have everyone who wants to go sign up. Grouping usually starts about half an hour before we start in on the instance. It’s important to get a good group composition of each of the eight classes in the game. Certain classes are healers, tanks or damage dealers. We need a little bit of everything to be successful.
Once we have our 40 people together we’ll zone into our instance and start killing everything inside of it. There are two types of monsters (or “mobs”) in a dungeon: Trash and Bosses. Trash mobs generally don’t have any good loot on them while bosses will drop between 2 and 4 epic items. There are 8 bosses and a ton of trash mobs in BWL. The bosses are generally the interesting part and the trash is pretty boring.
The basic operation of killing any monster is for a Tank to run up and tank it while healers keep the tank alive and damage dealers attack the boss. All fights are variations on this theme, but they can get pretty involved and interesting depending on how Blizzard decides to design them.
As I’m sure you can imagine, with 40 people in a raid and only maybe two dozen items dropping we must have a way to sort out the loot. We use a system called Zero-Sum DKP. Basically it rewards people who have been on more raids by giving them priority for items. We use seperate DKP for items that are class-specific and items that anyone can use.
So basically I’ll be reporting on the wacky antics and dragonslaying that goes on during a typical BWL raid. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
Glossary (For a more complete list, see this page.)
- Raid - Our group of 40 players intent on killing everything we can find.
- Instance - Your group’s personal copy of a dungeon. Resets weekly.
- Lag - Delay between actions and results. Our server is infamous for its lag spikes.
- Class - There are 8 character classes ranging from Mage (ranged magic damage dealer) to Priest (main healer class).
- Dragon - Big, breathes fire, eats village-folk.
- Wipe - Everyone dies and we have to try again.
- Tank - A Warrior wearing a lot of damage mitigation and hit point enhancing gear.
- Aggro - To effectively kill a monster, the tanks have to keep the monster’s attention by “maintaining aggro”. By doing this, the healers only have to heal people who can effectively soak up damage. A tank “losing aggro” usually means the raid is going to wipe.
1
I haven’t made it high enough to do BWL yet, but this should be a good opportunity to see what it will be like. Looking forward to it!
PS: In what timezone’s 7PM will this be?
2
(aβ Member)
I’m totally excited! The next best thing to a WOW addiction is playing vicariously through friends!
3
(aβ Member)
This will be EST 7PM. I’ll update the post.
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(Trackback)
Clickable Culture
Live-Blogger to Document 'Warcraft' Dungeon-Crawl…
Zach Brock of alwaysBETA.com will be reporting live from Blackwing Lair in the World of Warcraft this Saturday. The embedded blogger will be following a multiplayer raid on the in-game lair, covering the "wacky antics and dragonslaying." …
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(Trackback)
3pointD.com
Visit BlackWing Lair with alwaysBETA…
Clickable Culture reports that Zach Brock of alwaysBETA will be liveblogging during a raid in World of Warcraft’s BlackWing Lair, one of the toughest instances in the game. The raid is set to start Saturday, April 15, at 7pm Eastern. I kinda wish…
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(Trackback)
alwaysBETA » Blackwing Lair: The Live Blog
[…] Welcome everyone to my first foray into embedded reporting! As I mentioned in the Pre-Blog, I’ll be reporting live from Blackwing Lair in World of Warcraft. I’ll also be answering any questions you have along the way, so feel free to post comments if I mention anything that’s confusing. I’ll do my best to explain this in terms that anyone can understand, but it’s a little hard to remember what doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Thanks to the very cool Mark Chang, I have a monster of a computer in the Advanced Computing Lab here to play on tonight. Dual-core 3.4Ghz Xeons, 2GB of Ram, an nVidia Quadro FX 3450 and a 23 inch widescreen LCD. It’s almost too much to handle. But all the settings maxed out at 1920×1200 at 53 frames per second is pretty damn cool. For those of you who didn’t follow all that, I’ll summarize: I’m playing on a very fast, very pretty computer. […]
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… what happened to the liveblog post that was going on?
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(Trackback)
alwaysBETA » BWL Live Blog Post-Blog
[…] Well, I had a pre-blog and a blog, so a post-blog seemed in order. I actually had a really good time blogging what was going on. It was sort of hard to split my attention between both being there and talking about being there. It certainly made the raid more interesting than it usually is. […]
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Hi everyone i just went through the whole discussion and it attracted me towards it the live reporter seems to be a real cool buddy as the way he reports live from Blackwin Lair in world of warcraft is very impressive and friendly. Good going my friend
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