HS 84 – Squirls in this Tree
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If you listen you’ll understand the spelling in the title. 5.3 has launched! Sigmandis admits he hasn’t played in awhile, but he still re-installed WoW when he wiped his PC clean the other day. Xantar on the other hand has gone “so hard” on the content that he’s already received the title Horde Breaker.
In the news the hosts discuss a developer interview, some small news on 5.4 (yea already), Blizzcon, and more. Xantar also talks about some new audio equipment he ordered, but won’t arrive till about a month.
Also be sure to check out worldofpodcasts.com to find out more about the podcaster meetup for Blizzcon 2013. We would love to see you there!
HS 83: Financial Deep Dive
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So you might have been hearing about World of Warcraft’s loss of subscribers, but we doubt you’ve heard any other podcast go into Blizzard’s quarterly earnings statement? Did you know Sigmandis took a lot of accounting classes in college? Did you know he dives into Blizzard/Activision’s financials in this podcast to tell you where the money is really going? Well you do now! In this episode the hosts talk about a PvP riot, pokemon changes, Blizzcon predictions, and the quarterly earnings statement.
If you’d like to look at Blizzard’s quarterly earnings and follow along with the hosts in the podcast click here.
HS 82: Freedom?
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Holy Shatt welcomes Synzta, AKA Altabbed, AKA our webmaster savior, to our humble podcast. Synzta hosted “The Searing” podcast, a podcast about Guild Wars 2. As we gloat over the tickets we scored for Blizzcon, the agony for PVP players attempting to ride out Childrens Week (click for icy-veins guide), and a few other tidbits of news the conversation turns to World of Warcraft versus the former “WoW killers”. Rift, Star Wars, GW2 all failed to challenge the subscription model king, but seem to be doing just fine as free to play. With Neverwinter on the verge of its street day release will the newest free to play shake WoW’s player base? Or will it be yet another game to simply bask in a merger success while not coming close to toppling the king of the mountain?
HS 80: Ninja Turtle Allstars – World of Warcraft Podcast
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As our brave host Sigmandis journeyed through the lands of Arathi Basin he was brutally ganked by a group only known at the Ninja Turtle Allstars. We tried to find the groups guild website, but unfortunately they are too cheap to own one. We checked WoWProgress.com, but the guild doesn’t seem to raid. We checked PVP sites, but it appears the little turtles only PVP experience is ganking players that are at least 40 levels lower than them. Finally we found their armory page . We’re coming for you turtles…just wait for the dwarf’s to hit max level. You’re on the list!
In other news the hosts discuss ironically changes coming to PVP. We also check out some other small tidbits of news on 5.3 since there wasn’t much new to discuss. Xantar went into a very indepth discussion on mages giving feedback on every spec’s rotation, talent builds, and more. If you play a mage, this podcast is going to give you all you need. You’ll also hear Sigmandis get ganked…a lot. In the WoW 101 segment we talk about how to decide on your race, class, and spec and tell you what each means.
Remember to drop us an email or phone call with the secret phrase from our Facebook page. The drawing for the 30 day time code is only two shows away and we only have one entry. If you enter not only do you get to hear your voice or hear your email read on the show, but at this point you have a 50/50 chance at the show paying for your next month of WoW!
HS 79: Waiting on You
We use ques all the time for LFR, BGs, and dungeons. Its a great feature, but just like everything else in the game everyone has “suggestions” on how to make it better. Sigmandis rants about how people need to stop pretending to be software engineers with their “estimates” on how long it would take to implement a feature. We go over some more changes un-earthed from the PTR such as an in-game web browser, and great changes coming to transmorg.
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HS 78: To Battle!
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With Sigmandis swimming in a mountain of emails from work after returning from a two week vacation he used it as an excuse to have a show with no show notes. We discussed PvP changes coming in 5.3 and what we think Titan will be. Weatherspoon and Eyebeans also join us on this show. Finally we look back at how World of Warcraft has changed from the times we all got started in the game. We would love to hear your stories and thoughts on how the game was changed and we will read them on the next show. Be sure to email us or leave a voicemail on what you think has changed for the better or vice versa.
HS 77: 5.3 Cards (World of Warcraft)
Just when we thought we had all the special news like the World of Warcraft card game Blizzard announced at Pax East hours before recording, a bunch of stuff got posted on 5.3! While we didn’t get to cover a lot of the 5.3 news, we did touch on it. Also a big thanks to Rho from the Realm Maintenance podcast and All Things Azeroth for joining us as a guest.
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More…Site Change
If you’ve got a sharp eye you might have noticed a few small changes to the site. While only small things like the blog’s banner changing to Holy Shatt and the navigation bars getting rearranged are noticeable to you; there’s a lot that’s happened.
Originally Holy Shatt was part of my personal blog at Raleighite.com. As time went on the podcast became the main subject of my blog and started to take over. I wanted to still have a place to post when I wanted to write on subjects that were important to me, but it felt awkward to write anything that wasn’t related to WoW. The podcast also has become quite popular and needed a site of its own for SEO benefits, and to generally have its own community. Splitting the sites was a big undertaking and I had to do it very slowly to make sure I didn’t mess anything up. As far as I can tell everything on this site is functional, and after the next show I’ll be able to verify that iTunes and Sticher are picking up the RSS stream correctly. Even with all the tasks completed, there’s a lot to be done. Here’s my current to-do list.
- Evaluate new theme for site with better built in player support
- The current theme uses a really annoying “Tumbler” like feel. While it was great for making the site look nice with little work, its also really constrictive. The built in shockwave player isn’t working right because it can’t handle the higher bit-rate quality MP3s we’ve been putting out, and it doesn’t seem to make the best use of the right rail. With out being too techy we want to go for a cleaner feel, while still having some more room to place stuff if we want.
- Verify all podcasts are pointing to new directory
- I’ve already gone through and checked that the posts with URLs to the podcast’s MP3 file are pointing at the right directory. You might not have noticed but this was already going on since episode 65 as the posts on Raleighite were pointing to the HolyShatt.net directory for the MP3. I still want to make sure they’re all working on Sticher and iTunes so once the RSS is verified I’m going to start deleting the shows out of the old directory, verify they still work, and then pull all the podcast posts from my old blog.
- Change up the live stream page
- We put a lot of work into the live stream page, but its still not where we want it to be. Too many people were getting confused because we used a Twitch.TV stream, and a UStream chat client. We’re going to go with a single service to eliminate the confusion and allow more people to join in with less headaches.
- Add functionality
- I’ve been looking at a lot of plugins, wigits, and other web tools to expand the sites functionality. Small plugins that allow you to leave a voice mail from the site in just a few clicks are great to help our listeners reach out to us easily. I also want to integrate our social media platforms such as the hosts Twitter accounts, the Facebook page, and the dying G+ page into the site as well.
- Show quality
- The last and biggest task is going to revolve around sprucing up the show itself. Voice audio wise I’m pretty happy where the show is. Xantar still needs to replace his microphone, but that’s a quick and easy fix. The hard part is going to be around planning out new segments, getting some high quality audio loops and segment announcements, and hopefully redo the awful show theme I quickly cut together back in the days I still used Garageband.
We have a lot of great stuff in store and as the site gets all settled in we hope to start another push to get more listeners. That means better prizes! I really appreciate everyone’s patience as website troubles have been far too frequent on the site, but we’re almost done with the rough stuff that’s been causing problems. Stick with us!
HS 76: The Tour Guide
Announcement: Holy Shatt will now regularly be posted on Friday mornings at 6AM CST. Getting the recordings out the morning after a late night recording was a little too much pressure and didn’t allow me the time to prepare pretty images, detailed show notes, and edit the audio to make it sound a little better. Now you can join me (Sigmandis) and Xantar to help you get through your Friday workday and into your weekend!
ANOTHER ANNOUNCEMENT: We are welcoming back Rho the host of the realm-maintenance podcast and co-host of All Things Azeroth to the show next week! Join us live at 8PM CST next Wednesday to check it out.
News Coverage:
- Race to world first on Throne of the Thunder King! At the time of the recording Blood Legion was in 1st place, but the newly formed partnership of Exodus and Team Vodka (see story two) was nipping at their heels. Check out the leader boards at WoWprogress.com to check in on the action. Also of note the first wing of LFR is now open so if you find yourself without a group to raid with que up and check out some of the amazing imagery in the new raid.
- Team Vodka was one of the most recognized US raiding guilds around. Many people were wondering why they weren’t popping up on the leader boards as the race kicked off for this tier. Amid a lot of confusion over them forming a partnership with a new guild and going by Evodus we found out they’re still raiding in this tier after merging with Exodus. The Mana Flask has an interview with the leaders of the new raid group and explain why the team is still under the Exodus name and why the merge happened. A great read to help those of you with dwindling raid groups as merging teams together is becoming a common thing as the game looses raiders.
- Blizard developer Rob Pardo announced with this tweet that they will have an announcement at PAX East for Blizzards new game. Since the tweet specifically mentioned new game many gamers anticipated it might be the unveiling of Titan. Pardo quickly followed up with another tweet that states it won’t have anything to do with Titan so we’re back to guessing exactly what’s going on.
- Our good friend Twizz from Twizzcast got one of the biggest gifts Blizzard can bestow on a podcast by allowing the Twizzcast crew to interview Ghostcrawler! Both of us wished him well and wanted to be there, but unfortunately it was during our own show time. Check out the recording here, you can bet we are.
Discussion Topic:
- Xantar plays tour guide for me as I try to do my first run through on the daily quest hub. We talk about stuff like Zygor guide, dying (in game), and other random nonsense.
Emails:
- Long time listener Dayfred calls in with a bad experience with a random group of rouges in a scenario. The two leather wearing throat slashers demanded our friend to heal instead of DPS and when he refused kicked him out of the group. A hunter later did the same and then complained about his DPS. Weatherspoon provides some feedback and says its not unusual for a balance druid to toss some heals, but it does really hurt DPS. I complain about how attitudes like the ones Dayfred had to deal with are killing the WoW community and driving away players and turning off people new to the game. Xantar gives some input form a mages point of view as well since rogues are nearly as squishy as mages. If you need some help learning your class (I look for it all the time) check out Icy-Veins.com in particular here’s a link to their detailed breakdown on how to play a balanced druid.