Word has suddenly started flooding in that the EU-first kill of Heroic Yogg-Saron with no Keepers, a.k.a. Heroic: Alone in the Darkness, has been scored today by... no, not Ensidia. Paragon of Lightning's Blade EU has managed to steal the EU first (and world second) achievement. Hopefully this one will actually stick, unlike Exodus's kill.

Paragon is no slouch of a raid, but this still comes as something of a surprise. Prior to this kill, GuildOx listed Paragon as the 10th top raid in the world. Top ten material, but when it comes to firsts, rarely do you even look that low on the charts. It's pretty much the top two or three that dominate across the board. All eyes were on Ensidia and Method, maybe Premonition, Inner Sanctum or Wraith if you were generous, but probably not Paragon. We can probably consider them the underdogs when it comes to this kill.

Congratulations, Paragon. If you guys get banned for 'sploits and make me look silly twice in as many weeks, I will be most upset!

Update: I've also just been sent a screenshot that proves it, if the Armory wasn't enough.

Not all of us get to run around with Val'aynr. But for you mace casters out there who aren't first on your guild's Legendary list, here's another sweet mace to hunt down.

Name: Constellus (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)Type: Epic Main Hand Mace
Damage/Speed: 93-298 / 1.80 (108.8 DPS)
Attributes:

• +55 Stamina, +54 Intellect
• Blue socket with a +5 Spell Power bonus
• Improves crit strike rating by 29, restores 19 mana per five seconds, and improves spell power by 587

I was never one for these tabletop strategy games or D&D but thanks to WoW I have become quite a tactician. Tactics are so integrated in the game that they come into play figuring out how to down Hogger without aggroing too many of his numerous minions, to sneaking through hostile territory and avoiding NPCs who want to kill you all the way to confronting KT in Naxx or Ignis in Ulduar. The latter is especially true, Ignis is a nightmare where a knowledge of tactics is life or death. When your raid leader asks if everyone knows the tactics and you all nod heads and mutter yes, it's not actually courtesy, he or she is trying to figure out how many people will survive long enough to down the giant er ... giant.

Once upon a time all you had to do to learn the tactics was play. Wiping on bosses and the depression of death, failure and repair bills can be a great motivator. At the same time, there are few unique boss fights in WoW. They all follow some kind of pattern and sometimes phases are even borrowed from other mobs. Others, such as Shade of Aran's Flame Wreath go down in lore and legend, even getting their own ever-so-catchy (nay beautiful) theme tune. I challenge anyone to move after having heard that (I even have that in iTunes and would play it just in case my raid forgot. No one ever did.).

So I wonder, constant readers, how do you learn tactics? I can read WoWwiki, for example, until I'm blue in the face but because of the weird way my brain is wired (don't ask), the only was I can truly learn tactics is in the fight itself. Yes, there's YouTube, there's the pre-boss-fight sit down where the raid leader does a run though the fight because no one bothered to take ten minutes to do some reading up. What methods do you use?

Welcome to Scattered Shots. I am Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from The Hunting Lodge and you're not. Today we are reviewing what pets you should consider for raiding and how to spec out your pet for the best possible DPS. So join me will you? As we explore what it takes to make a raiding pet.

This past week has been an interesting one for Hunters and their pets. If you were like me, finding out that Hunters could tame Garwal's Worgen form, reminded you of why being a Hunter is truly awesome. Of course it would last and Zyrhym showed up and had to burst our bubble by delivering the bad news that Blizzard was removing them from the game. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

What was nice about this glitch was the passionate responses seen on the Official Forums and Hunter community at large. It really highlighted how much we Hunters love our pets. Many of us see them more as companions than just some other weapon in our Hunter bag of tricks.

One way Blizzard has helped foster this idea is by letting us have three different categories (Ferocity, Tenacity, and Cunning) and literally hundreds of different pets to go out and tame. But to me the best part is being able to not only tame my pet of choice, but having the ability to train him. Doing this makes Hunters and their pets a combination as epic as Nutella and Pancakes.

When you set out to tame your pet, make sure and match your need with the correct category. For pure DPS you have Ferocity. Need a tanking or good solo pet? Get a Tenacity one. And if you are in a PvP situation and want to make sure someone has your back no matter what? You could try a Cunning pet. With dual specs and Call Stabled Pet you can now match up your spec with the right pet and further enhance your status as the Supreme Hunter! Let's take a moment and talk about Ferocity Pets and raiding specs, alright?

Today The Care and Feeding of Warriors is confused. Matthew Rossi looks at this week's patch notes and sits there blinking a lot, not entirely sure what to make of them

Another week, another series of patch notes to leave me scratching my head and saying "Seriously? This is what we're doing, nerfing the crap out of agility for tanking? Did dodge rating steal somebody's lunch money as a kid? And Shield Block, I trusted you." It's strange to feel betrayed by a core tanking ability. I get why they're nerfing it, since they're increasing the amount of Block value on gear that has to double it's current values, I've already heard Prot warriors and paladins contemplating putting together BV sets for PvP and this change will keep warriors from using SB to get hideous crits in PvP with Shield Slam. At least I think that's the reasoning: I can't believe that anyone was actually worried about Prot Warriors' DPS while tanking in PvE content being too high after the change for 10 seconds out of every 40. Even if Protection Warriors put on every single piece of Block value gear imaginable, that 10 seconds of double damage with Shield Slam would still leave them at the absolute bottom of the tanking basement in terms of damage dealt while tanking.

The agility change is a near non-issue for almost all Warrior tanks: maybe you had Agility as your cape enchant or a few AGI gems, but for the most part Warriors don't stack Agility as tanks. However, since Dodge is at the moment probably the best stat a warrior can stack, the Dodge rating changes will sting quite a bit. (I am aware they're more like a hammer to the back of the head for Druids, but even so.)

We're doing the podcast at a special time this week, so if you can't usually tune in to us on Saturdays at 3:30 Eastern, now's your chance to catch a live show. Tonight at 6pm Eastern, we'll be live over on the Ustream page, and our special guest will be none other than Medros, of the All Things Azeroth podcast. He's the second in our ongoing series of guests from around the community -- Michelle Madison of Warcraft Outsiders, you'll remember, was on a few weeks ago, and we're planning on having more podcasters and bloggers on with us in the coming weeks as well. Medros will join Lesley Smith, Turpster, and I in discussing the biggest news of the past week, including those Worgen pets you may have seen around the game, what Tom Chilton said about the future of World of Warcraft, the upcoming changes to Northrend flying. And if things work out as planned, we might even be able to get a live report straight from the PTR about how testing of the Crusaders' Coliseum is going.

Should be a great time for sure. Tune in tonight on our Ustream page. It all starts off at July 9, 2009 6:00 PM EDT, so you can head there or just hit the link below to find an embedded version of the stream after the break. And while we'll be chatting live as usual during the show, you can always send us a note about something you hear or something you'd like us to talk about at theshow@wow.com. We'll see you tonight!

I was just bemoaning that we haven't gotten a chance to see patch 3.2's new raid content yet. It looks like that chance will come sooner than I expected: tomorrow night!

Daelo has just posted a testing schedule for Trial of the Crusader (a.k.a. Crusader's Coliseum).

• North American realms: Lord Jaraxxus, Thursday, July 9, starting at 7 PM EDT
• European realms: Eydis Darkbane and Fjola Lightbane, Thursday, July 9, starting at 19:00 CEST

Both of these fights will be available in normal mode (10 or 25) only, not heroic. The new 5-man, Trial of the Champion, will be open "later in the PTR cycle."

He also notes that Koralon, the new Vault boss, will be up, and you'll be able to access it if your side has Wintergrasp. Tanking and DPS Patchwerks will make a return. Unlike the patch 3.1 PTR tanking Patchwerk, this one just hits really hard ("as hard as Algalon"), all the time (instead of ramping his damage up over time).

Oh, and one more thing: there is, apparently, no trash at all in this raid. Woot?

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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Just in case you missed this excellent post about how to use Recount to its full potential (we also snuck it in our Daily Quest column a little while back), it's definitely worth a look. Most players just use Recount to check their own damage numbers, but as 4 Haelz points out, there's definitely a lot more to it than just that. Not only can it be used to examine overall output on fights and instances, but you can use it as a tool to monitor what kinds of spells are producing the most for you, and how your damage or healing output changes over time. You can also have it track who you've healed the most, or which targets you've really gone to town on, and you can then make adjustments to your play style from there.

Now, Honor's Code has another great post about the addon, this one specifically for tanks. Recount will actually let you bring up a "Death Report" feature that will allow you, as a tank, to suss out exactly what went wrong on that last wipe, whether it was something you were late on, or whether your teammates should have done something that they didn't. You can even broadcast that Death Report, so you can show the person at fault (of course you have to be tactful with this -- you have to make sure the person you're "correcting" understands that you're just trying to get better, not attacking them) exactly what happened and when.

Recount is such an excellent addon, and so many of us just use the top level functions of watching the meters (sometimes to the point where it isn't helpful at all). But used in the right way, Recount provides a treasure trove of information on what you've done during a boss fight, and how you can make yourself and the rest of your raid even better.

About a week and a half ago, we spotted the new raid lockout extension feature on the patch 3.2 PTR. It's not until this morning that Blizzard (specifically Eyonix and Vaneras) officially announced that the feature was coming, along with some clarified details.

The details are mostly what we expected: Extending your lockout will let it roll over into the next lockout period, consuming your instance ID for that day (in the case of heroics) or week (in the case of raids). You can extend your lockout more than once, probably indefinitely, but Eyonix wasn't specific on how many times you can do it in a row. I assume indefinitely. The extension is also on a per-person basis, meaning if you PUG someone into your 25man run, they can't screw you by extending their lockout. That also means it's not a raid leader decision. At least, not mechanically. It's up to the individual to click that extension button.

World-first Heroic: Alone in the Darkness? "Didn't Exodus already get that?" you may ask. Well, they did get the achievement, but they used an exploit, and were slapped on the wrist to the tune of a 72 hour suspension. Which means: the stage was open for a legitimate world-first!

In a break from the tradition of European guilds getting major world-first accomplishments, Chinese guild Stars (playing on the Taiwanese servers) has apparently completed the achievement legitimately. They got that nifty Mimiron's Head mount, too.

In case you're scratching your head wondering what this is all about, during the Yogg-Saron fight (the last boss of Ulduar), the four Keepers of Ulduar (Freya, Thorim, Hodir, and Mimiron) help you out. You can choose how many of the Keepers you want to activate for the fight, and if you use fewer than all of them, it's hard-mode. "Alone in the Darkness" is Yogg-Saron with zero keepers: as hard as it gets.

Congratulations to Stars on a truly impressive feat.

I'm not a keyboard turner -- my steady diet of FPS games growing up made sure of that. And while I do occasionally point-and-click abilities, for the most part, I do use hotkeys. But, just like Tank Like a Girl, there is one control-scheme sin that I'm definitely guilty of: I am definitely a Tab-targeter. I guess the issue is that sometimes you do have to use Tab to choose your different targets -- sometimes, you can't quite click on the thing you need to target, so instead you hit Tab to flip through all the available targets until you get to the one you need. But that's a no-no. Flipping through the targets takes more time than you should (if you happen to miss your target, you need to flip through all of them yet again), and, as I know from personal experience, Tab targeting often ends you up on the wrong target. Not that CC is so much of an issue anymore, but let me tell you: the first time you happen to pull that one dragon your group has cast sleep on, it'll be embarassing.

So how to get it right? TLaG suggests this post from TankingTips, which hints at using the mouse instead of the keyboard to target (you can choose friendly targets easier that way), but doesn't offer any real suggestions of how to make the switch. Moving the camera back is one, getting your positioning right is probably another. And learning to use focus and macro targets is probably the best tip you can have: anything that's more specific or direct than either Tab or click targeting is probably better. Addons like Promixo will help in the Arenas as well.

No one's perfect, and no one way to do things is perfect either -- depending on your situation, Tab targeting might be better. But it's important to have as many tools as possible, so if you, like me, find yourself depending on the Tab key more often than not, it might be time to mix up your toolbag a bit.

AddOns are great. We all use them and they enhance game play. Indeed as we've seen from sites like Curse there's a thriving trade. The thing is a lot of newer MMOs, most notably Aion, have everything that AddOns provide and a bit more built in. While Blizzard is starting to cotton on with the introduction of their own threat meter and quest tracker, there's still a long way to go. Perhaps the most notable change in this direction is the promise of a somewhat basic quest helper in 3.2. Now I've been using the actual QuestHelper for quite a long time (indeed it's one of my essential AddOns) and from what I've seen of Blizzard's version, they have a long way to go.

But, it's a start. In the past year Blizzard seem to have finally realised that their player base like the perks of AddOns and the way they enhance the game, but not the frequent updating which is required with every major patch. So readers, what are your thoughts on the whole Blizzard/AddOn thing? Do you think they are just taking the best ideas and adapting the most popular AddOns into their own versions? Do you prefer using AddOns like Omen and QuestHelper? Do you see yourself using them for a long time yet? What would you like to see AddOn-esque feature would you like Blizzard to implement next?

I've always considered the Caverns of Time to be like the theme park of Azeroth -- as we've discussed before, there aren't really any reasons to go to some of those instances in the first place, and the whole thing seems just so ludicrous. If we wipe, or we don't go in there, and Thrall isn't able to escape Durnholde or Arthas isn't able to murder Stratholme or any of the other premises they have set up, then wouldn't the world as we know it change? It seems like fan service -- Blizzard wants us to visit these great parts of lore, and it just seems to me like they've cooked up a weak story around getting us there.

Which is why I was surprised to read this post over on Mystic Chicanery. They argue that the Caverns of Time are actually the most "real" of all the instances in the game. If we go into Utgarde Pinnacle, for example, and murder King Ymiron, there's no reason why he should be in there again the next time we head in. And yet he is -- we can go in and murder him time and time again, doing the same thing, and getting loot every single time. But in CoT, there's a logical explanation for why the instances are always the same: to the people we're encountering in the instances, it's the first time we've met them. From the outside world, the CoT instances may seem strange (the first time I was in Durnholde, we wiped with Thrall, and I jokingly checked with my guild to see if Thrall was still standing in Orgrimmar, alive and well -- he was), but inside the continuity of those instances, they work.

Of course, we do still get different loot from it every time, as the MC post notices. But it is quite a thought: even though the Caverns of Time instances are the ones in the game that seem to least need us messing around in there, they also might just be the most logical.