After shipping players off to a new continent and even an entirely different planet over the last couple of years, Blizzard has gone full steam ahead with the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion, which brings the world's most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game back to its roots. And then it takes those roots, grinds them up, and serves players an entirely fresh experience in the world of Azeroth. Join GameSpy columnist and WoW-head Leif Johnson as he travels through this whole new world (of Warcraft), exploring new zones, beating new dungeons, and enjoying what may turn out to be the happy medium to unite diehards and casual gamers alike.



The View From the Top

A mere two days after I hit level 85 in the wake of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm's release less than a week before, the guild Premonition on the Sen'jin server was accomplishing great things. Specifically, while people like me were busy catching up on their professions and gawking at the new faction rewards, Premonition was carving a name for itself as the first raid guild in the world to slay the 25-man version of the dragon Nefarian. That's no small accomplishment, especially considering that Nefarian is the final boss of Blackwing Descent -- one of the three tough raid instances that appeared with Cataclysm's launch. What's more, that's just one of a number of world firsts for this long-running Alliance guild, which has consistently ranked among the world's top guilds since their founding in 2007.

The leader of this ambitious bunch is a 25-year-old Californian named Andrew, who's better known to the gaming world at large as Xav, a Worgen warrior. Xav is one of those rare players in World of Warcraft who approaches something resembling celebrity status, and he frequently appears on lists of the greatest tanks in the game. I've seen players who treat screenshots of his user interface and talent trees like holy scripture, and I've encountered others who obsessively take note of every minute change to his gear. And since I've long felt that this column needs an expert's take on the current raiding environment, Xav seemed like the perfect man to comment on successes and failures of Cataclysm's current endgame raiding scene. As you'll see below, he turned out to be an epic source of information.


Premonition vs. Heroic 25-Man Nefarian.


Jeremiah Leif Johnson: Where does Premonition stand in terms of current progression?
Xav: Contrary to popular ranking sites and how they arbitrarily rank guilds, we're the top U.S. guild at the moment, having been the first guild in the United States to clear all of the 25-player raid content back on February 2, when we killed Nefarian on heroic (or "hard" in layman's terms). We were the fourth guild worldwide to do so as well.
Jeremiah Leif Johnson:That's pretty impressive. How much of a time commitment does it take to get that far ahead so quickly?
Xav: When we're progressing through a new instance, we raid five to six days a week, for about five to six hours a night. As soon as progression is over (usually anywhere from a couple weeks, to a month or two), we drop down to a day or two of raiding per week, at about four to five hours a night.
Jeremiah Leif Johnson: That sounds like more than enough time to immerse yourself in Cataclysm's new raid encounters. How do they compare to previous raid instances?
Xav: Cataclysm is awesome so far. It's got a pretty diverse range of raid encounters, the difficulty is way up there, and the current fights are easily some of the hardest Blizzard has ever made. There was even a ton of content available right after we leveled to 85 – like 13 bosses across three instances, all at the same time – so it was a lot to cram in. But we loved it.
Jeremiah Leif Johnson: Do you like any of the encounters in particular? Or, for that matter, do any encounters stand out for being exceptionally bad?
Xav: Well, I'll only be talking about heroic raids here, since that's what we raid. Heroic Al'akir is super-fun, as is the Omnotron Defense System and Conclave of Wind. Al'akir's a big wind lord guy who throws a ton of lightning and tornadoes at you, which can really abuse your character if you stand in bad places. I know I'll get a lot of grief for singling him out, but that's just because a lot of guilds either have a poor strategy, or don't understand how to survive the fight. Phase 1 can be hell because you may get slammed with an abundance of things to avoid, but that unpredictable spontaneity is what makes Al'akir so awesome. You really have to make the right call several seconds in advance in order to stand a chance and not die.
br> Throughout our progression, I got to see so many people pull really impressive feats to stay alive. Of course, I also got upset when the same people repeatedly died and seemingly didn't know what the hell was going on. As for the worst fights, I'll say Cho'gall, just because the encounter has such a ridiculously high need of interrupts (especially area-of-effect interrupts), and I have a vendetta against the Horde and the advantage they get from the built-in racial interrupt for Blood Elves. I hate it.

Jeremiah Leif Johnson: Do most of the encounters offer new challenges, or are many of them merely variations on other encounters that we've seen before?
Xav: It's honestly pretty damn rare to get entirely new mechanics nowadays. Nothing is really super-new, but a few fights really emphasize something that was never used that much before. Cho'gall really rewards you for having excellent positioning, and the "dragon siblings" make you assign teams to go through portals much like we've seen before, but with a few more restrictions on how and when you use the teams in question. The Omnotron Defense System encounter had a ton of potential for adjusting to an encounter on-the-fly, since you need to fight four golems with widely differing abilities at once, but they kind of botched it by making the order in which the robots activate static rather than dynamic.