Winterveil Achievement 2009

Warning: Work in Progress, percentage complete: 99%

OK, so CHRISTMAS is here and we have the next instalment of the World Events Achievements.

I mucked up with Hallows End and didn't buckle down and get things done so I ended up a couple of achievements short of full completion.

I will only be a few weeks behind everyone else getting every world event achievement done as long as I don't 'lag' again!!

So, what do you have to do to complete the Winter Veil Christmas achievements.

Part I

1. Get your fat lazy <insert class name> butt to Ironforge.
2. Pick up quest "The Reason for the Season" from Goli Krumn to left of bank entrance (this is not required for achivement but good XP).
3. Pick up quest "Santa Claus" aka "Great Father Winter is Here!" from Wulmort Jinglepocket to right of Father Christmas
4. Pick up quest "Metzen the Reindeer" from same dude.
5. Pick up quest "Some Bastard has Stolen Xmas" aka "Stolen Winter Veil Treats" from same dude.
6. If you don't have some buy a small stack of snowballs.

Part II

1. Buy Gingerbread Cookie Recipe
2. Buy Hot Apple Cide recipe
3. Buy Egg Nog recipe
4. Buy 5 Holiday spices from dude
5. Acquire (Alts, Bank,AH) 6 Small eggs
6. Buy milk from Gwenna Firebrew in the Inn to the left of AH
7. Make that greedy fat bastard in red 5 Gingerbread Cookies. You only need 1 for the achievment but you may as well complete the quest!
8. Hand in "Great Father Winter is Here!" to St Nick
9. Accept and Hand in "Santa's a hungry fuck" aka "Treats For Greatfather Winter" to St Nick.
10. Buy 2 x Holiday Spirits and 5 x Holiday Spices from goblin dude.
11. Buy 1 x Sparkling Apple Cider from the girl goblin Macey.
12. Make 1 x Hot Apple Cider.
13. Make 1 x Egg Nog
14. Achievment Gained: The Winter Veil Gourmet.

Part III

1. Acquire Mistletoe and Snowflakes by kissing the revellers in the Inn every hour.
2. Buy crafting recipes or get stuff from alt and get Winter Boots(Leatherworker 285) and Green or red Winter Clothes(Tailor 250) .
3. Go defeat Grand Magus Telestra In The Nexus or Mage-Lord Urom In The Occulus for a red or green Winter Hat
4. Wear all 3 pieces of winter gear and eat Graccu's Mince Meat Fruitcake.
5. Achievment Gained: 'Tis the Season.

Part IV

1. Pootle over to the big library place where all the explorers league dudes are
2. Hand in "The Reason For The Season" and get "The Feast of Winter Veil".
3. Read the book then go hand the quest into the King.
4. Once spoken to King throw a snowball at him for Achievement Gained: Scrooged
5. Go get a flight to Southshore or Chillwind Camp and ride up to Alterac Mountains where the Yetis and ogres are.
6. Hand in "Stolen Winter Veil Treats" to snow man near Growless cave and get "You're a Mean One...".
7. Go find and kill The Abominable Grinch (Level 36 Elite) who spawns in 4 possible locations: [x,x], [x,x], [x,x] or [x,x] and loot the Stolen Treats.

Part V

1. Fly over to Thorium Point in Searing Gorge.
2. Head to [x,x] in the north east of the zone
3. [Alternative: Pirate Camp in Eastern Tanaris]
4. Open up the bag you were given when you got the quest and use the Pouch of Reindeer Dust on Rudolph. He will Bubble-hearth outa there. Do not destroy Pouch, you need it to hand the quest in.

Part VI

1. (Assuming we now have Mistletoe) Fly to Menthil and boat to Theramore.
2. Use the mistletoe on Brother Karman by the Training Dummies.
3. Fly to Nigels Point and use the mistletoe on Brother Anton.
4. Go to Stranglethorn Vale and use the mistletoe on Brother Nimetz.
5. Head to Stormwind by whatever means necessary and go snogging the brothers:
6. Brother Kristoff outside the Cathedral.
7. Brother Benjamin wandering around in the Cathedral.
8. Brother Cassius in the first aid area in the north-east of the Cathedral.
9. Brother Crowley in the north-eastern cellar of the Cathedral.
10. Brother Joshua by the altar in the Cathedral.
11. Go to Goldshire and use the mistletoe on Brother Wilhelm by the Forge.
12. Achievement Gained: Bros. Before Ho Ho Ho's.

Part VII

1. Head back to Ironforge.
2. Hand in "Metzen the Reindeer". Achievement Gained: On Metzen!.
3. Hand in "You're a Mean One..." and get and complete "A Smokywood Pastures' Thank You!". Achievement Gained: Simply Abominable.

Part VIII (PvP)

1. Use the "Wintervolt Changey Thing 8000 outside the gates to the city.
2. Enter some battlegrounds and get 50 HKs while under the influence of the Wintervolt thingey.
3. Achievement Gained. With a Little Helper from my Friends.
4. While in the battlegrounds try to sprinkle the required following race/class combinations, don't worry if you don't get all of them when you get your 50HKs do the rest around Dalaran or Shat later. If your below level 60 - have fun!!!
5. Orc Death Knigget
6. Tauren Shaman
7. Undead Rogue
8. Gnome Mage
9. Blood Elf Warlock
10. Human Warrior
11. Night Elf Druid
12. Troll Hunter
13. Dwarf Paladin
14. Dranei Priest
15. Achievement Gained. Let it Snow.

Part IX (TBC Content)

1. [Requirement: level 70/Flying Mount/SkyGuard Rep] Go to Ogri'la and transform your mount into a Reindeer with some holly and do the bombing quest.
2. Achievement Gained. Fa-la-la-la-Ogri'la.

Part X (Wrath Content)

1. Go to Dalaran and use a Winter Veil Disguise Kit to become a snowman and dance with another snowman
2. Achievement Gained: A Frosty Shake.

Part XI (Christmas Day)

1. Open a present under the Tree. Achievement Gained: He Knows if You've Been Naughty.
2. Get hold of a Crashin' Thrashin' Racer and get 25 crashes. Achievement Gained: Crashin' and Thrashin'.

Title Achieved: MerryMaker

Anyway, this is a work in progress, but just about finished

Ding 75

HolyWarrior and EvilBastard finished up the quests around Wildevar Fort or whateva its called and headed off and did the Kalulak dailies before heading back to the Keep with the Zepeelin bombing daily quest.

HolyWarrior fell off the zepellin while doing the quest but hey-ho. Once done they handed in the quests that were done on the way to Wildevar and dinged 75!!! WooHoo!!! Well HW dinged, EB is still a bubble off because HW went off on a killing a skinning spree at some point!!!

Half way to level 80 and the guild are in Naxx-25 - Yay :) ... and ... BooHoo :(

Patch 3.0.8 Awesome Tapping???

One thing that stood out for me in the patch notes was:

* Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.

I assume this means that if EvilBastard throws a corruption on a mob some evil fucker can't come along and tag the mob before corruption ticks!!

What's with the "Tapping" was this a dev's poor handwriting being misread by a low paid, non-wow-playing secretary? taGGing!!!

Level 74, Nexus and Dalaran

HolyWarrior and EvilBastard dinged 74 doing the basket collection daily in Boring Tundra. YAY!!!

Before I could get to Dalaran a guild alt run was planning on an instance so EB and HW tagged along to Nexus.

HW easily healed the group through the entire instance as ret-spec in T5/T6 healing epix and HW only died twice when he fell off a cliff thing somewhere in the middle and then on the only boss wipe of the run which was Kalistraza or whatever.

EB died a couple of extra times, once on the penultimate boss and once on the succesful Kalistraza attempt. I was probably not treating him fairly with heal priorities as I was dual boxing and that would be unfair on the others!!!

Anyway, both got all their Nexus quests done and got 5 bubbles out of them and the run!!!

Afterwards they popped to Dalaran and set their hearthstones there.

Awesome?? Not really, don't see what all the Dalaran fuss is all about, just another city to find my way around :P

Sex Change

Sorry, err why am I apologising? Probably no-one ever reads this!!!

Anyway, I have been busy getting to 80, not busy enough though as I am still only 18 bubbles into level 73 on both HW and EB!!

Anyway, I spotted over at Doofy and BoK (and probably many others places that I haven't work my way to yet today) that you can now customise your character even more for just $15 per month. I'm guessing £15 too!!

All the other stuff you can already do already in game like haircuts or through your account management via paid character name change; but now you can change your sex!!!

Yes, brought to you by the wonders of "Goblin Enhance Natural Identity Transfer And Libido Swap", or G.E.N.I.T.A.L.S. for short, you can now have a character sex change!!

The Guilds Wrath Progress

So, whilst I was frigging about with alt characters the guild went into Naxx-10 as a 100% guild group for the current raid-lockout period on Thursday and then again on Sunday.

They mostly one-shotted the bosses but had some problems with some of the bosses.

Last night they cleared Naxx-10.

That's right, my guild cleared Naxx-10 over the course of 3 nights in the first raid-lockout period they went all-guild!!

Go Go Portugese Porkers!!!

Unfortunately I am still level 72. DOH!! This gave me some inspiration to start levelling the Good and Downright Evil Duo again.

I wants Naxx!!!

Refer a Friend Levels Lost?

OK, I've been slacking. HolyWarrior and EvilBastard are still sat in Howling Fjord at level 72.

I spent most of the weekend transferring stuff between my Rogue, Mage and Priest on another server with all the alt bankers there in the anticipation of moving those three over to HWs server.

I moved the Mage over hoping to grant him some of the levels from the Druid and get him to 60 but I couldn't, the option wasn't there.

Now I don't know whether it's because the druid is now level 61 which is what the GM said or whether it's been over 90 days since I linked the accounts. I don't even know if the 90 days matters and I don't know whether I can create a DK on the 3rd account and grant the levels from there or if the levels were character related and are now lost for good.

/sad

WotLK Progress

Well as everyone is frantically trying to get to level 80 and run heroics so they are ready for raids I thought I'd give a quick update on my progress.

HolyWarrior and EvilBastard are still in the starting sub-zone of Howling Fjord and haven't moved since Sunday. BitchSlapper and HotPants however have been running around Tanaris, Badlands and Hinterlands mining Mithril for BS and JC profession levelling.

Go me, got me priorities straight!!!

The guild now has about 15 level 80s and I'm still at 72 - OOPS!!

Phew - I'm a Man!!

Gender Analyser reckons there is an 84% I'm a man, I wonder if that's down to all the profanity!!

I'm a Performer?

TypeAnalyzer (learn to spell you buggers - It's AnalySer) Is interesting but I'm not that impressed.

Thanks to isisxotic for this link who got it from The Leader of the Pack.

Mine was almost identical to Isisxotic's except I was leaning slightly more towards "feeling" thank "thinking", which is bollocks ... isn't it?

Finally...

2 More acheivments done on HW and EB. "Explore Boring Tundra" and "Boring Tundra is ... err ... Boring!"

That is the levelling duo managed to uncover the last little bit of the Tundra map and then got the 130th quest in zone completed.

Last Rites
They then went on to do the Last Rites chain to complete every quest in the zone.

They both dinged 72 at some point yesterday evening and after doing The Last Rites this morning with a PUG (a full 5 man PUG doing Last Rites at 7am this morning - WTFBBQ???) they hearthed back to Shat, trained their level 71 and 72 skills and got the boat over to Howling Fjord.

Howling Fjord
Now that is a cool boat trip, sailing up the fjord, underneath a burning ship wedged between the cliffs high above.

They are now sat in the inn gaining a little rested xp before exploring this zone.

Changing Tactics
I had originally specced HW as Retribution to run in and grab mobs and get beaten on and then get EB to throw Seed of Corruption around liberally.

I found that to be a bit of a pain trying to keep HW healed and then losing some mobs who would go and thump EB about. So I started just pulling the mobs with Seed of Corruption but HW would burn through mana far too quickly.

So I equipped EB in all his green stamina gear, boosting his HP up to well over 12K (but losing some considerable SP) and got HW to equip all his holy gear so that I could spam FoL getting worthwhile short cast heals out and not draining mana. EBs lack of SP is now made up by getting a couple more SoCs out before having to switch over and start healing.

It's much better. But I am now in the Fjord and I had heard that there are nice big packs of undead, so it maybe easier for HW to gather and keep aggro. We'll see.

Wrath - the First 5 Days

No posts? What a surprise!!

Day 0 - 12th November
At 20:00 on the 12th of November the first Death Knights appeared on our server. By 21:00 our guilds first Death Knight had appeared!! WTF??? I think they were Russians or Eastern Europeans. You would have though that they may be able to buy the game at midnight local time but the servers wouldn't open up DKs or Northrend until 00:00 server time. Not so.

So at 10 minutes to midnight I arrived at my local game shop to be met with a queue all the way around the shop and only 12 Collectors Editions up for grabs.

Oh Bugger!! Well, it could have been a lot worse I suppose, this was at an out of town shopping centre. The shop in town had had people waiting most of the day!!

Day 1 - 13th November
Oh well, by 20 past midnight I was walking out with my 3 pre-ordered copies of Wrath.

By 01:00 I had it installed and was running round handing in completed dailies for a boost.

I had decided to level just HolyWarrior and EvilBastard together first and then level Mark, Sven and a DK afterwards.

03:00 Server reset so time for bed!!

09:00 Back at it and all quests handed in and HW and EB are in Borean Tundra.

16:00 I am not powerlevelling these 2 up, although Consecration followed by Seed of Corruption is lovely. They are enjoying the content and doing everything. Finished up at the DEHTA encampment for the day.

Day 2 - 14th November
I am following a levelling guide I found over at Random Ravings of Warcraft. It is serving me very well so far, I am thinking of converting it for use in Tour Guide(link may not work).

Anyway, today saw me finishing up Coldara and heading off to FizzCranks airstrip with a double level 71 ding in there somewhere!!

Day 3 - 15th November
Not a lot of time on today :( couple of quests done. Did go and see the new James Bond film - Quantum of Solace though. It was crap, don't bother!

Day 4 - 16th November
Created my 1st DK and got him through most of the starting area then got dragged out shopping. Bloody women. Tried to logon at around 20:00 to be met with a queue of 798 - GAH!!

Side note: My son was watching some of this and saw many references to DK in guild chat (luckily I hadn't turned the mature language filter off yet!!) and he was wondering why Donkey Kong was in WoW!!! LOL!

Day 5 - 17th November
Finished up the DK starting area but as I accepted the quest for the Light's Hope Chapel quest someone had already started the event, so I only saw about half of the event and then got a complete. I will have to create another DK just to see that properly (on another account/server obviously).

So I took DrunkardDK to Hellfire and experienced Barrens Chat part II. I was there when it realised what it was becoming and I made the [probably not] first crap Chuck Norris joke! Hellfire at them moment is just a load of DKs and their ghouls running about. One thing of note here is that you cannot summon a ghoul from a demon goddamit!! And where do you get corpse dust from? Hey?

I then logged HW and EB back in and got most of the rest of FizzleCrank airstrip quests done. I have a few left to do and am about 5 bubbles off level 72. I just keep getting distracted by large herds of Mammoths. EB just can't help throwing a SoC on as many as he can before HW needs to start spamming full rank Holy Lights on him at ret's ridiculously inefficient mana cost!!

When I logged off our guilds highest level, a shaman, was mere bubbles away from level 80, followed by a 77 pally and a 76 warrior.

My plan of having a quest log full of completed quests really needed to be followed up by a) not going to bed at 03:00 on release night and b) actually spending the previous 5 days playing the game!!

OMG - Where Have I Been?

Maybe it's the lead up to Wrath, maybe it's my change in domestic situation, maybe it's the fact that work has been really busy the last few weeks but I have neglected this blog and I have neglected WoW.

I have spent the odd spare hour here and there levelling Mark and Sven who are now finishing up Hellfire Pen and level 62-ish and I've been on a couple of raids. But that's about it.

I missed the last 3 raids and I have logged on for about 2 hours in the last week and that was to start filling up HolyWarrior's quest log with completed quests. For a hopeful kick start on Wrath day.

All my chars bags are still full, EvilBastard has an empty quest log, Sven the Druid the 3rd part of my levelling to 80 trio is still at level 62 My banks and alt guild bank are full of mats that will be next to useless in less than 24 hours. My gold reserves are no where near high enough to be buying a mammoth - over 1K gone on epic land mounts for Mark and Sven. Acheivement are sorely lacking although HolyWarrior has discoverd all of Azeroth, Kalimdor and Outland!

Oops!!

How have you been preparing!!

Illidan - YOU Were Not Prepared

After Thursday's MH and 3 BY bosses we went to finish up Black Temple tonight. We went and one shot Teron and then moved onto Bloodboil who I had missed before and got him down easily.

Then we moved onto Reliquary of Souls which also went down easily.

It was at this point that I started disconnecting all the time, it was very annoying and I missed Shiraz and The Council, but I had seen them once before anyway.

I finally managed to get back on and stable in time for the first Illidan pull. We had a good attempt at him but wiped somewhere around phase 3 I think.

Then we gave him another go and got him down!!!

I got a nice healing cape which was an upgrade from my Bishop's Cloak and a pair of Tanking gloves for minimum bid!!

I personally have now cleared Black Temnple. That is I have been involved in every boss kill!! WOOT!!

MH and BT Zerg

Oh yeah baby. 27 minutes into Mount Hyjal and the first 2 bosses were down.

In less than 1.5 hours Archimonde was down with a 1-shot on every boss again. The T6 helm dropped which I really wanted but was outbid. Guess I'll have to stick with the T4 helm until next week.

So, with an hour of raid time left we headed over to the Black Temple and 1-shotted Naj, Superman and Shade.

OMG!!

2.5 hours for a full MH clear and 1st 3 bosses in BT!!

Sunday should see a full clear of Black Temple and then Tuesday should be some Sunwell Plateau fun :)

Sunwell Plateau and 3.0.2 Pally Healing

Tonight we entered Mount Hyjal at around 20:40.

After 30 minutes the 1st 2 bosses were dead. By 22:10 Archimonde was dead. All 5 MH bosses one-shotted in 1.5 hours - WooHoo!!

OK, this is post patch 3.0.2 and we have already cleared MH several times pre patch 3.0.2 but still; 1.5 hours!!!

Season 4 or Tier 6?
Only one T6 dropping boss dropped pally T6 loot and my Brutal Gladiators Handguards are better so I didn't bid.

I was throwing out massive 10K heals and getting into the swing of throwing out Holy Shocks and watching for the proc to get a quick Holy Light onto the tank.

I also had the Holy Light and Spiritual Attunement glyphs attached so was loving the splash healing numbers popping up. I ended the night on 3rd healing spot only beaten by 2 priests. I didn't really notice much from the SA glyph. I also have a Flash Heal glyph but am not sure that fits with my healing style.

Into the Sunwell
After this we went and killed some Sunwell Trash. We had our first wipes of the evening but it was great to finally see the inside of Sunwell.

We hadn't got to the first boss by raid finish time and a few of us had to go. The rest said they were going to carry on with 20 people. I am yet to find out what happened.

Refer a Friend Power Levelling Tip.

Mark and Sven are storming through the old world. They are up to level 55 now and this has been boosted by the Halloween event.

At level 50-ish they get 11-12K XP for each pumpkin quest they do, so I have spent quite some time this weekend touring Azeroth doing the pumpkin quests and also making sure to explore most regions for the Explorer achievement.

If I'd simply flown to each location and done the quest I would have finished a lot quicker. Hopefully they'll be high enough on level before Friday to do the Outlands one without having to 3 box escort them with EvilBastard.

ILLIDAN DEAD!!!

I was not there. Our server is suffering major queues to logon nowadays, probably due to people coming back to the game and doing achievements and levelling inscription for WotLK.

By the time I logged on the raid was already full and people were being rotated out. This is probably due to people seeing that Illidan is on the cards and want a shot at him so have decided to start raiding more regularly.

So, I didn't get to raid tonight. Black Temple was already 8 out of 9 bosses down just from Thursday night's raid. Bastards!! So it was straight up to Illidan... and 2 hours later he was dead.

I am gutted, but pleased for the guild.

Gazban and Curse of the Tides Still Bugged

Blizzard are fucking useless.

The Curse of the Tides quest can randomly getted bugged; reportedly if someone dies trying to kill Gazban.

Well, he has been bugged since last Wednesday or Thursday and I have had repeated tickets in about it. GMs never answer me when I am online and simply send me an in-game mail once I have logged off saying that devs are aware of the problem.

The rolling restart at the weekend didn't fix it and the Tuesday night maintenance did not reset him either.

Tonight a GM actually answered my ticket and said there is a fix: "kind of". He said to abandon the quest and wait for him to despawn on the island near the Vile Reef and then retake the quest.

Well I tried that and it didn't fucking work. I wasn't that hopeful, I think he was on drugs, he kept saying awesome!!

I know it's not game breaking and it's only a level 40-ish quest, but come on Blizz - it's been bugged for 2 years. Pull your frigging fingers out.

It's grey to me now and I wanted to finish the quest chain but screw it, time to abandon.

Black Temple Zerg!!

I have already mentioned that in Sunday's raid that I missed my guild took down Bloodboil and Reliquary.

We had a further expedition planned into the Temple last night to pay Mother Shiraz a visit.

How Much Shadow Gear?
We had lots of discussion in the guild forums during the day about getting the Shadow Res gear sorted. I had collected most of the mats for the Shadesteel set a few months ago. Turns out I was still missing 6 primal shadows and a primal life, but I got all the HoDs from the guild bank so I would only be short one piece.

Oopsy...
Unfortunately real life got in the way again and I couldn't get logged on till raid invite time. So no chance of getting my SR set crafted and I still hadn't set up any addons or spent my talent points. So a quick rush to SW and purchased the judgements and then got a summon to SMV after I remembered to grab my shadow res cloak and medallion from the bank.

And off we go.
Not many people had managed to get any shadow res gear together and all I had was my Night's End cloak (enchanted with shadow res) and my Medallion of the Karabor. The raid had already moved into Black Tenmple and I was stood at the summoning stone assigning my talent points and fixing my UI. LOL. I went 46/3/12 or something in the end.

I then got a summon up into the temple and I had no idea where we were but we were slicing through trash like a hot knife through butter!

And then Mother Shiraz was standing in front of us.

We stood around chatting about it for 15 minutes and then gave her a shot. We wiped, but she was hurt.

Then we gave it another shot and killed her!!!!!! WOOOT!!!

Shadow Res gear? Not a lot. She went down so fast it really wasn't needed!!

Shiraz Strategy.
She is a bit like Solarion. If you get teleported (with 2 other people) you need to run away from the raid and more importantly from each other. Once your all 25 yards away from anyone you lose the de-buff. Other than that, kill the bitch.

Oh My God
So after no loot for me we moved on up to the Council. I could not believe I was actually standing in front of the Council. I never thought I'd ever see this. So what if it's nerfed post patch 3.0.2!!

So in goes TiceNits and pulls. Hectic. Wipe

TiceNit's again. Dies quickly. Wipe.

Imp in first and TiceNit's pulls from the imp. Better. Wipe.

Another good pull, going well. TiceNits dies. Wipe.

Ressing up. NoobMage body pulls. Wipe.

Good pull. I die at about 50%. TiceNits stays up. 5 or 6 people dead. More people dieing. The Council are down to 10,000 HPs and get a heal. ARGGGHHHH!!! Wipe.

Res up. All goes well. AND THE COUNCIL GOES DOWN!!!!!

Another 2 new bosses down in Black Temple!!

You are not Prepared.
Well, after the loot is distributed we have to go at least have a look at Illidan. So up we go, get set and pull.

We burned him through phase 1 super quick and then all collapsed into the middle and got our asses royally handed to us only a few seconds into phase 2.

It wasn't a serious attempt as we didn't ave the fire res tanks. But we got to fight Illidan. Oh Yes. We were NOT prepared. He was right!!

Refer a Friend Level Granting to be Fixed

When I got home last night I was able to do some more research on this.

Turns out that patch 3.0.2 wiped all the levels that you could grant to your referrer that you had not yet used. Arggg that was 20+ levels for me :(

Originally Blizzard said that they were sorry that they were lost, but any levels earned after patch 3.0.2 would be accrued correctly.

Oh great, well done Blizz!!

After the obvious outcry Blizz finally came back a week later and said that it would be fixed in this weeks maintenance.

So I guess we'll find out in 35 minutes if they are true to their word!!

WoW Vista - Confusing?

One thing I forgot to mention about patch 3.0.2 was that on my Vista machine (GODDAM I really must format and install XP) It moved the WoW directory to stop any patching problems.

I now have my addons in 3 different places. Or do I? All the addons would download to the Virtual Store. That was bloody annoying to start with, but I eventually dealt with that and copy them over to the actual WoW installation directory.

But now I have to copy them to something like C:/Users/Public Documents blah blah blah.

Or do I?

I have resorted to downloading the addon. Extracting it. And then pasting them into any directory that has other addons in it. They are all over the place :(

WTF?? Refer a Friend Broken?

I am at work, I can't check it out but the rumour is that WoWInsider is reporting that if you signed up for Refer-a-Friend before patch 3.0.2 and have been saving your grant-a-level's up then it is broken.

Anyone else hear this. I am scared and am going to be really pissed off.

OH MY GOD!!!

I take one night off raiding because of stupid real life and the guild take down Bloodboil and Reliquary.

/sadpanda

Sprite Darter and Curse of the Tides

Mark and Sven are storming through the levels.

There was one point where Mark the Hunter kept getting ahead in XP and I could not figure it out. Was there a hunter talent that gave you more XP for killing things that you are tracking? Is it still there? Mark seems to have shot ahead again :S

Switching in RaFs
Anyway, so M&S caught up with BitchSlapper my warrior, so I swapped from Mark to BitchSlapper and caught up Sven's XP and got the RaF quest hand in bonus for a lot of quests for BitchSlapper and powered her up to level 50!!

Lots of Travelling
Then I finished off STV with M&S and then took them on a little trip round the continents a few times doing various Feralas/Darnassus/Tanaris/Hinterlands quests, including the Sprite Darter and Cortelo's Riddle quests.

How to Get You Sprite Darter
I always forget when you have handed in the ring to the bird in Darnassus that you have to go back to Feralas and talk to the elfs again to get the quest to get you Sprite Darter pet, so was wondering why there was no follow up. Doh!! Just head back and they have a new quest for you! Of course after that the quest chain is pretty straight forward, just follow the steps.

Tip: Before going to see Quentin in Shimmering Flats remember to buy/make 2 x [Elixir of Fortitude].

They have now finished Hinterlands, what I could be bothered with, and are now going to go and finish off Tanaris and head down into the Crater.

Blizzard - Fix This Frigging Bug
The Curse of the Tides quest is bugged again. The part where you have to take [Catelyn's Blade] and use it on the Altar in the Vile Reef. It's been bugged for practically 2 years.

If someone starts the summons him and fails to kill Gazban, either they run off or die, then he gets bugged, he's tied to them or just simply bugged. He goes green (friendly) and there is nothing you can do except petition a GM and hope the lazy fuckers will do something.

Last time this happened to me, probably with HotPants the Shammy I managed to get a GM to reset Gazban and was able to kill him and loot the Stone successfully. I put in many many tickets asking for him to be reset but they never got back to me. Conveniently answering my petition once I had gone offline. They would answer that the devs were aware of this problem and would fix it soon.

Yeah!! 2 years and counting you useless fucks!!

I even put in the petition (nicely) that I was aware that the devs were aware of it, I knew the GMs can reset him because they have done it before for me. I would just like you to reset Gazban please Mr Nice GM!!

Nope. Even after a rolling server restart he was still bugged. The quest is grey to me now but I am going to plonk M&S on top of the altar on Tuesday night and go straight there after Wednesday maintenance and see what happens.

53 Tomorrow?
M&S are currently sat in Booty Bay. I was too tired to carry on handing in quests. They are a hair's breadth away from 52 and I have lots of quests to hand in. So just with a little travelling and quest hand-ins level 53 should be within reach.

Patch 3.0.2

So, Wednesday was fun.

My vista machine had spectacularly failed to pre-download much at all of the patches giving me a 6-7 hour estimate for patch 2.4->3.0 to download. Then there would be another 6 hours of patch 3.0.1 -> 3.0.2

Luckliy my XP machine at my Dads had faired a lot better. The first night it had downloaded the first 968MB or whatever it was.

Getting the Patch the Cheating Way.
Over the course of the next few weeks it had downloaded most of the rest.

I booted that up and it went straight to 1.59GB out of 1.62GB in about 9 minutes.

Install that and it's time to download 3.0.1 -> 3.0.2 That went from 549MB to 561MB in super fast time.

What took the most time was transferring >2GB over the wireless network to my laptop. That took about half an hour, and then another half hour in reverse getting it on the Vista-piece-of-crap at home!!

Realms up at 13:00 my Fat Hairy BBB.
So with that all done it was time to try and logon. It was around 12:30 Server time. OK that was a bit optimistic, but 2 PvP realms were active. That didn't last long.

The posted maintenance end time of 13:00 came and went and a few realms started coming online. None of mine though :(

The 13:00 was extended to 15:00 and come 14:30 one of my realms was up. I tried to logon "Retrieving Characters"

Yawn.

And We're in...Kind of!
Once I finally got to the Character select screen and tried to log onto my mage it got to 100% loaded and hung there. Yawn.

Eventually I got logged on, tried to mount, and I kept getting errors. Oops, the mounts are now in your character sheet.

The mount was learnt but the icon was still in my bags :S Not only that but there were no NPCs, post boxes or anything.

"World Server Down" (again)

...and again...

...Retrieving Characters...

... 100% loaded and stuck...

.. IN!! ...

"World Server Down"

Screw this, do a bit of work and come back a little later.

All My Addons Still Work ... Not!
Late evening and all was a lot more stable. I got online with Mark the Hunter and most addons were FUBAR.

OK, rather than sort each one out individually I renamed the Addons folder and started downloading all WotLK compliant addons afresh.

All but grid, simpleminimap,doublewide,lightheaded and elephant were available although Trinity2.0 has ceased to be an is now Macaroon and light-headed and doublewide were just because wowinterface was overwhelmed!

So with all the addons installed and Macaroon being a comparable alternative to Trinity2.0 I was online. That took about an hour to get fully sorted and grid still works although the minimap and DW and Lightheaded addons just do not work but do not error.

I then loaded up Sven the Druid and got him sorted out in about 5-10 minutes and I was off dual-boxing again.

Don't Forget to Reallocate Your Talent Points.
After a while I realised that spending my re-imbursed talent points might be a good idea and the new trees look pretty cool, especially the hunter pet trees - looks like charge is available for all pets!! Seeing a Crocolisk flying across the screen to a mob is fun!

I had a good few hours levelling yesterday and got them up to level 46. Nice!!

My first plan when I get them to 59-60 is to grant some levels to my warrior.

Now when I do this I am going to get my warrior as close to dinging as possible so she gets a boost to 60 (from 49) and then only has to grind a little to hit 61.

Now I want to know what will happen here. Say she is at 19 bubbles into level 49 with say 81,000 XP and I grant her levels up to level 60. Will she be 81,000XP into level 60 or 19 bubbles into level 60?

My Highlights so far of Patch 3.0.2:

• Hunter's Pet's talent trees and the fact the pets don't desert you
• Clams stack in your bags - no more bags full of clams when grinding naga!
• Mounts and Pets no longer taking space in your bags - more empty bag goodness.
• You can mount up and ride around Booty Bay!!
• Ships have NPCs and you can stay mounted onboard!
• Smooth energy/rage/mana/hp regen - whose idea was ticking regen? Crap. Most useful on kitty form so far, but BBB form and rogues will be just as excited!

I really must go check out the Pally talents and get the addons and UI sorted for HolyWarrior, luckily I cannot raid Sunday so I have 4 days to sort that out, if I can drag myself away from Mark and Sven.

Raiding in 3.0.2
I though that just Sunwell, Black Temple and SSC bosses were being nerfed. But my guild 5-manned all the way up to Opera in KZ on Wednesday. Maybe it was just the re-aligned classes, but that still ain't bad!

Casters are complaining, especially shadow priests, that they have been nerfed through the floor. Hunter's on the other hand are pwning ass!!

Oh ... and I just spotted some training dummies in IF that you can interact with, presumably allowing you to train up weapon skills while AFK!! That's better than a trip to Blasted lands and whacking down the servants!! Which incidentally you can't do anymore anyway.

Oh ... and I love the new logon screen :)

Oh ... and will Blizz please fucking kill all the level 70s farming low level herbs. How many people are complaining about clearing mobs around their level to get at some herbs and a level 70 comes flying in on their epic mount and snatches them. Tossers!

Have fun everybody!

ArchiMonkey Down Again!

Quick update: We went to MH for the last time before patch 3.0.2 last night.

We were hoping for a quick kill to prove the last kill wasn't a fluke. Oh NO!!! The first attempt we got him down to about 50%, then we had 10 wipes.

The raid leader calls the last try of the night. We are getting him down and people are dying, but with 10 healers we manage to keep the chain reaction from happening.

For most of the night I was down in 7th or 8th healing but on this attempt I was the best pally and the 3rd best.

Somewhere between 15 and 11% I died, I was totally consumed by the fire and could not bubble out. Dead Pally.

We were down to 5 or 6 people as he dipped into 10% and IMMUNE!!!

He got down to 5% (due to our low DPS) and dropped dead, just going to prove that you can sit back an watch as he will die anyway, rather than having 1 minute or whatever to DPS him down.

No Loot for me but 3 more badges! What use are they going to be in 4 weeks?

Can't be Bothered

The guild went to Mount Hyjal to clear the four bosses so I can be the saviour on Tuesday and we can kill ArchiMonkey again.

I didn't go as I had a birthday dinner to go to. Lucky Really cos I frigging hate MH trash.

All 4 bosses went down easy and they even got a try on Archi!!

A Quick BT

A Quick 3 boss Black Temple tonight.

One shotting Naj, Supre and Shade.

Nice. Goodnight.

5/5 Mount Hyjal

WoooHooo Yippeee Hooray!!! I got to go on the Mount Hyjal raid last night. On Sunday they took out the first 4 bosses and had 1 try on ArchiMonkey with the usual wipe!!

Tonight we went straight to ArchiMonkey. Our best try ever had been 42% in the past. Our first try tonight and he was down to 31%!!

This was boding very well until we tried again and got a couple of 70-80% wipes in. Then we got him down below 50% again.

Then suddenly on the 5th or 6th try he was down to 30% and no-one had died.

20% and we're getting excited.

15% TeamSpeak ramps up.

11% so close...

10% IMMUNE!!! Here we go...

ARCHIMONKEY IS DEAD - WE ARE 5/5 MOUNT HYJAL - CHEER!!!

2 Helm of the Protectors(Warrior, Hunter,Shaman), 1 Helm of the Conquerer(Pally,Priest,Lock), Tempest of Chaos and Savior's Grasp. Plus some badgers dropped.

I bid all my DKP on the T6 Helm token but was out bid by a good 300 :(

But I did win the chest piece - Savior's Grasp for a 3rd of my DKP.

Slacking

I haven't been to a raid in weeks.

The only WoW I've really done is levelling Max and Sven up to level 40.

Hopefully I'll be going to Archimonde tonight and that would be good to kill him before the patch 3.0.2 boss nerf happens in 1 week.

Apart from that, there doesn't seem much point in doing anything else!!

Patch 3.0.2 15th October 2008

That's my latest guess

Giving us 4 weeks of hellish raiding with new stats and talents that Black Temple and Mount Hyjal are not tuned for.

Or will they retune bosses for new class mechanics?

Stop

Breaking News: Honour and BG Marks Safe for Wrath

No citation, no proof. That's a job for more conscientious bloggers. But the rumour I have just heard is that all your stockpiled honour and marks of honour are NOT GOING TO BE RESET!!

Yep, your honour and marks are safe!! (Arena points will still be reset when you hit level 71 or whatever). Seems Blizzard are worried about the backlash caused when half their customers claim not to have heard about the reset!!

Of course this may all be a vicious lie, so if you have any citations please let me know.

This is what a guildie just told me:

"We had hoped that the introduction of some new Honor rewards in the upcoming patch would give players a great opportunity to spend any of their remaining Honor. However, many players would still be surprised by an Honor and token reset as it isn’t something we’ve done in the past. As such, we've decided to not reset Honor or tokens upon the release of Wrath of the Lich King. Players who save their Honor will be able to spend it on level 80 rewards, although those rewards will be significantly more expensive than their level 70 counterparts."

Fimlys gave me an idea today.

Mark hit 32 yesterday and Sven was 2000 XP off 32 and have all the Duskwood quests going grey or green; so I may just swing on over to STV once I've done the food quests and the Legend of Stalvan, although I do love making Stitches appear!!

So anyway, I read about Fimlys' Shamlock duo plans and remembered I have a bank alt full of STV pages so I can make all the chapters for both Sven and Mark instantly!!

Remembering that normally they give a huge chunk of XP I'm thinking this could be good!!

Bank alt mails 2 sets of each page to Mark the Hunter, I fly them both down to the rebel camp, fly them back to Duskwood and actually get the pages out of the mail box (don't ask why I flew them BOTH back - DOH!), fly back to the Rebel Camp and make a quick uneventful run down to see Mr Nessingwary Jr.

Each of the 4 chapters quests gave me 3300 XP, that's 13200 for the lot. OK not too bad, takes me about a 1/3 of the way through level 32. Then I hand in the final quests. 19,000+ XP for that one quest!!!

Just the STV pages took me from the start of level 32(end of 31 in Sven's case) to the end of level 32!!

Cheers Fim!!

Revenge is Sweet

How many times has a hunter wiped the floor with HolyWarrior? Many times! You may remember my Epic Arena against a hunter a few weeks back.

Well, as Sven and Mark were trying to hand in a quest log full of quests in Redridge MountainsI was being plagued by a paladin wanting to join my little group. I kept explaining that it was just the two of myself questing and we didn't want to group up. He kept saying "inv", "you need paladin", "i wanna join", "give me inv plox" as if I had to invite him to my group.

Eventually he threw me a duel invite and said "If you beat me I leave" (without the capitalisation).

OMG, I get to try out my leet huntard skills.

1. Lay Frost trap.
2. Get ranged.
3. Sick pet on noobadin.
4. Concussive shot.
5. Some sting or another.
   
6. Arcane shot.
7. Noobadin runs off under bridge.
8. Pet kills Noobadin.
9. Saunter off to Inn.
10. ROFLMFAO!

I didn't even need to do BRK's jump shooting.

He went down like a sack of shit so quickly it was incredible. I may find myself hanging around Goldshire some :)

I Haz Authentimicator ... and half a tree!!

As reported last week the Blizz authintimict ... security donglz ... came back into stock in the Blizzard(Europe) Store.

I got TiceNit's to order one then rushed home and purchased 3 for myself.

Why?

Because although the donglz only cost about £4.60 the postage and packing is almost twice as much on top!!!

WTF???

So I ordered 3. One for me and my three accounts and a spare two to hopefully be able to sell on eBay for enough profit to cover the postage once the Blizz Store goes out of stock again.

Of course, knowing my luck the Blizz Store will never go out of stock now, but hey ho!! I'll give them away if that is the case!

Anyway, so why all the postage and packing cost? Well Chain Trap has summed it up pretty well here.

But for those of you who can't be bothered to click through. Each of my donglz came in a diddy little cardboard box with a sheet of instructions. Encase in a Jiffy bag. All 3 in separate bags. And then all these in a very oversized box.

WTF Bliz? How many trees were felled to get me my donglz?

Asleep?

I might as well have been. I have barely done anything in WoW recently. Last Tuesday's raid was cancelled. I couldn't make last Thursday's or Sunday's. Although I did log on 30 mins before raid-end on Sunday and got an invite for the last try on Archimonde.

Would have been wicked to have downed him, but no, it was another wipefest. Their best try was 43%.

I did do a little levelling with Mark and Sven, they got all the Redridge Quests finished and the hand ins got them from level 27 to 29!!!

I then got EvilBastard to take them through Stockades this evening. They could handle 2 mobs carefully on their own but would be out of mana by the end, so I thought it best to just rush them through in 15 mins and get a whack of XP from the hand ins.

By the time the PC crashed I had gone from 29 to 31 on hand ins and follow ups and still had a couple or three to hand in.

When I get home tonight I'm gonna go get my mounts and FEIGN DEATH and hopefully travel form for Sven. Is that a level 30 talent?

Anyway, that's all, very boring!

Gold Cap?

241,000 Gold is the most you can have?

Someone on our realm recently hit this magic figure and apparently you can't have any more gold than that.

Lolwut? Why that number? Somone said it's 2^20 copper, but it isn't, I don't get it.

But if you spend half your in-game life surfing the auction house making money what do you do when you can't do that anymore??

One for Doomilias

I Spotted this sign in the gents toilets in our office, as it's toilet based I thought Doomilias might appreciate it!!

This sign was actually right outside the stalls, check out the scrawl at the bottom of the sign!

Authenticators Are Back in Europe

Oh yeah, the authenticators are back in the Blizzard Store.

Go get it now or don't moan at me when your account is hacked.

I was at work when I read a blog post announcing it. I can't access the Blizz Store from work. Damn corporate firewall!!

I rang TiceNits and got her to buy one - The frigging postage is more than the widget itself!!!

I rushed home and logged in, created my Blizzard account - WTF???

Finally I got to the checkout with 3 of them in my basket and ... woo hooo !!!

Yeah I have 3 authenticators and 3 accounts .. I know that I only need ONE authenticator for all THREE accounts.

I'm gonna wait till they go out of stock again and eBay the other 2 for loads money!!

Well, hopefully enough to cover the extortionate postage the bastards are charging for 8-10 business day service and to get mine for free!!

Raid Checklist

I haven't managed a raid in some time, either due to can't be arsed or rotated when I can be arsed; typical.

So I was all up for a Teron Gorefiend fight tonight.

I logged in an hour early. Fixed the bugs caused by addons - I couldn't see my avatar but everyone elses appeared fine and I couldn't use certain items as they said "Retrieving Item Information", like my Netherdrake!!

Anyway, disabled trinity, logged in, logged out, re-enabled it. Works fine :S

All repaired - Check.

DI macro fixed - Check.

All consumables stolen collected from guild bank - Check.

Ready to go - Check.

Group invite. Check.

21 people signed. Check. Uh-oh!

Raid time. Check.

17 People in Raid Group - Check - Double Uh-oh!

Raid cancelled - Check.

BASTARDS - Check

/logoutandgotopubinahuff - Check!

Wrath 8.5 Weeks

I was going to update my previous post to reflect Alex's comments and refine my guess to 8 weeks (2 weeks to patch + 6 weeks to Wrath).

Turns out that would have been pretty close. November 13th 2008 is Northrend Day. Seems to be all over the blogosphere already!

Oh and the patch is about 950MB - I recommend setting the options to not throttle background download and leave the PC on overnight!

PvE to PvP Paid Server Transfers

It's here, deal with it!

Patch 3.0.2 in 2 Weeks WotLK a week later!

OK, that's my guess. Don't hold me to that. But the background downloader has been activated and that usually means a helluva a big patch.

Blizzard have stated that there will not be a patch 2.5 so it's a gotta be WotLK pre-patch.

Bye Bye raiding!!!

My guess is that Rash of the Itch Kin comes out on 1 October 2008 1 week later. I am prepared to be wrong!

*Image courtesy of 3-mobile, used under fair usage. If you have a problem with that please email me and I will remove it.

Loadsa Posts

OK, I got behind with my posts. They are all dated from previous days but were not completed; usually because I hadn't found the images I wanted.

I am up-to-date now.

But the last 5-7 days of posts I just released now!!

Enjoy!!

Interesting Search Terms

Occasionally I go through my referal logs to see what people have searched for to fin me. A few of interest sprang up in the last few days.

lessons to be learnt from good & bad women in the bible - Hmm that's not my bag baby.

n52 macro afk - I do not encourage using n52 macro's to be an AFKing leeching bastard! Although this could be quiet interesting. 1-target nearest player 2-put on follow 3-count to 130 4-move forward to break follow 5-summon mount 6-target nearest player 7-follow 8-count to x where x is average time to get to Galv. Anyway, No. AFK leeching is bad!

open vajaina - Hmm

cute vajaina - Hmm

ticenits - WTF??

Archimonde You Git!

A whole evening wiping. Best was 41%. He is a fucker!

Don't Forget Your Free Gems

Tip of the Day: Don't forget to get and get your free gems from the consortium dude in Nagrand. New batches available every month.

Bloody Pets

The little fuckers are still abandoning me. I feed them and stroke them and let them kill things and feed them some more, but they are still leaving me.

It's getting to the stage when I just want to shoot them!

I need help, I have a moonsaber now, and I really like the looks of it, but it's 10 levels lower than me and even though I feed it all the time I am waiting for it too disappear!

In other news, I upgraded the trial account to a full TBC retail account and Mark and Sven are now level 24 and picked up some nice blues from Deadmines courtesy of a do it yourself boost with EvilBastard!

I smacked on a 6month subscription but I won't get my Zhevra mount yet because I bought a battle chest and that comes with 30 days free!!

I didn't go to Mount Hyjal tonight, I got drunk instead, but the guild got boss 4 down easy and spent the rest of the night wiping on ArchiMonkey. They did get him down to 40% though!!

My Pets Hate Me!!

I need help from the hunters among you, and I know there are shit loads of you!

So, one of my refer-a-power-level characters is a hunter. I'm levelling him BM. The problem is I have already gone through about 20 pets.

The fuckers keep abandoning me - lolwut?

Nice Kitty
I tame it, I give it a cute name, usually NicePallyClassLeader. I feed it what it likes every few minutes sometimes. I take him out for some killing spree. The little green icon in the top left of the pet pane is always green. One of them I even got up to loyalty level 3.

But, they just randomly fade out and when I try to summon it or revive it I am told I don't have a pet to summon.

Bad Kitty
The little buggers disappear even though they appear to be contented. WTF is going on? TiceNit's has a level 70 hunter and she can't see what I'm doing wrong, another guild hunter can't either.

Bad GMs
I have put in countless GM tickets about it and the useless tossers just come back and say that I can't be feeding it and it has got unhappy with me and left. I got so irate with the last GM that I demanded to speak to his supervisor because I knew it wasn't normal and it wasn't me being a noob.

Ignore
Needless to say I didn't get to speak to his supervisor so I told him I was making a complaint against him and put him on ignore.

By the way, you can't ignore GMs, they continue to speak to you!!

So hunters and huntards out there. What am I doing wrong? Any tips?

Thurday Mount Hyjal

We went to MH last night with the plan of doing 4 bosses giving us 2 full days on ArchiMonkey.

We managed the first three, but it took longer than expected and we didn't have time to take out the fourth. That will be Sunday. Nothing else to see here.

Badges: 42

Refer a ... Err ... Me

So I've been having fun with my druid hunter combo. Sven the Druid and Mark the Hunter have been levelling well in the odd half hour a day I give them.

But, I've come across a bit of an anomaly and was wondering if wtf was happening with the triple experience you are supposed to get from killing mobs and ha ding in quests.

Quests seem to be OK, I handed in a quest un-partied and got 495 experience and then handed the same quest in on the other character whilst partied with my Refer-a-Buddy and got something like 1495.

But the mob experience seems odd. When my 2 characters were level 16 and on their own they would get something like 134 XP for killing a level 12.

Now if they grouped up (without the refer a friend bonus xp) I would expect their XP gains to be hit by the party penalty, maybe even by 50%, say down to 67XP each.

But they are refer-a-friend linked and can summon each other and grant levels etc so they should earn triple this penalised XP, therefore 201XP each.

But they don't, they earn 86XP when grouped and killing a level 12 mob.

WTF? Has anyone else found this? Am I bugged or am I expecting too much?

Google Chrome

Google Chrome has not even been out 24 hours yet and I have already had several people visiting this site with it :)

It still only accounts for less than 0.5% of yesterdays readership but it just goes to show we are tech savvy folks us wowbloggers.

I am going to check it out myself later.

edit: it looks good, but I don't like it.

Archimonde is a Bastard

I had to respec to healing for Archimonde. /cry On the upside though I forgot that in Sundays raid my HP was closer to 16.5 and not far behind NPCLs :)

So we went to Archimonde and wiped a lot. When I say a lot. I mean a fucking LOT!

I really don't like him but a kill would be awesome!

That is all.

Monday Kara

• HolyWarrior got invited to a Karazhan Group.
• HW wants the Sheruman Great ring for tanking gear.
• HW gets to tank Karazhan - Woot!
• Raid has difficulty summoning HW.
• HW flys and runs to Kara.
• HW can't zone into Kara.
• HW checks raid ID.
• HW remembers saturday drunk ninja invite and summon to Prince.
• HW /facepalm
• EvilBastard gets group invite.
• EB zones into Kara.
• EB forgot that Sunday involved clean addon install.
• EB spent most of Kara run configuring macros and buttons.
• EB acheived minimal DPS but still managed to die several times.
• Group took out Att, Moroes, Maiden, Opera(Oz), Bane, Curator, Aran and Hoof.
• EB took home 15 badgers for 2 hours work.
  

The Tanketh Doth Return

We had another succesful raid tonight. I was invited and held off respeccing in case I was needed as prot and we had 9 healers signed!

Both NicePallyClassLeader and myself got to pally tank?

So we went in, we did our stuff, easily did trash waves - 2 tankadins FTW!!

I swapped over to healing for the bosses and walked out of there with another 4 badges.

Except I didn't walk out of there. A warrior and I went for a little walk up the hill behind the horde camp and tried to get to Winterspring!!

He'd jump down and if he died I would jump and bubble then res him and we'd wait for the bubble cooldowns.

We got to the edge of the instance, very flat-earth-esque!! We tried a running jump off the edge but got stuck on the edge in mid-air.

We tried to HS - "can't do that while moving" - WTF!! We tried the auto unstick - "Can't do that while moving" oopsy!!

We could have put in a ticket but we logged out and hoped we'd get booted from the instance.

Update 01/09/2008: When I logged in tonight I was outside the instance!

Badge Total: 36

Ninja'd Into Kara

I spent most of saturday on my new "Alt-Refer-a-Multi-box-Friend experiment" (news and views to come and then went out for a few beers.

When I got back at around 23:00 I made the mistake of logging into HolyWarrior.

Seems a whole load of mains were in Kara at Prince and they just lost their 3rd healer and it was NicePallyClassLeader tanking, so they needed 3 healers!

I told them I was still prot specced and went in in my healing gear. We took him out easy enough and I have another 3 badges that I am struggling to find use for. Total: 32

The Waters Have Broken

...no, TiceNits isn't pregnant. We got to go raiding again tonight.

I Gets to Tank
I wasn't really expecting it and I may have had a few too many beers, but we were heading for Mount Hyjal without a tankadin, or at least we were until I respecced protection!!

Woo Hoo - I get to tank Mount Hyjal!!!

Oopsy Respec
So I went and respecced far too quickly, throwing 4 points into the +defence talent before I realised that I was already way over defence cap and combined avoidance - DOH!!

Also throwing 10 points into ret to get the 5% parry of which I probably only need 1 or 2% to hit 102.4% unbuffed (with Holy Shield)

So a lot of points wasted that I could have put into holy for strength and intellect and holy damage for threat or ret for ... well ... retribution threat.

Dependant on talents I may be better off going for the 5% parry and swapping out the last of my avoidance gems for more stamina and damage gems.

Low HP? - lolwut?
Anyway, that's for a different post, we went into Mount Hyjal, I was ~15.1K HP raid buffed. I was hoping for more like 16-17K. As soon as I got there one of the priests told me to trade her the shield. WTF? OK, whatever. I did and she slammed the +18 stamina enchant on it that my last shield had but I had not had time to acquire. Cool.

And then I died and died and died.

Maybe I should let the hunters and warriors peel a couple of abominations off before I start aggroing the whole zone with Holy Wrath, Avengers Shield and Consecration! Not to mention the odd Righteous Defence on those mobs being kited to the NPCs.

But at other times I had every single mob from the wave on me and was fine. I put it down to innatentive healing.

One Down One To Go
Anyway, we took out Rage first go and then went for AnEnema.

Myself and another warrior were assigned infernal tanks and we got the trash down and moved into position. I died to the first infernal that the warrior had grabbed. Ouch.

We wiped and I decided that on the next attempt I would swap into holy gear and off-heal the infernal tank.

Oh Smeg!
We took out the trash and I managed to swap into most of my holy gear before the encounter had started but forgot to drink and had no healing spells on my bars.

I spent the whole of that fight with less than 1K mana spamming down ranked FoLs from my spellbook - LOL

We wiped at 13%.

3rd attempt. I tanked the trash. Swapped into holy gear and drank most of the way up to 100% mana. And still forgot to put my healing macro's on my button bars.

Hmmm Interesting.
So I healed from my spellbook again, but this time only downranked the FoL to experiment with mana expenditure vs mana consumption. I found that I could spam rank 3 or 4 FoL and my mana regen could nearly keep up. If I was actually holy specced the rank 3 or 4 FoL would actually heal for a worthwhile amount and I could probably spam forever!!!

Anyway, we killed him and got the 3rd and 4th badges for the night!!

Badgers
Badges Before Shield = 58
Badges After Shield = 25
Badges After Raid = 29

"Toto, I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore"

Something weird happened to me last Sunday as I was dual boxing and transitioning my shaman, HotPants, from Booty Bay to Gadgetzan.

EvilBastard got on the boat at BB fine but the boat knocked HotPants off the quay. No that's not it, I've had that happen before. Before HotPants could swim back round the boat left with only EB aboard :(

So, EB gets to Ratchet and moves up towards the griffon master and then something weird happened. Can't remember what, maybe I couldn't click on the flight master, or get off my mount, or maybe I was still running up towards him; whatever it was it eventually resulted in me getting a DC.

So, I switch back to HotPants and get her on the boat and then go to log EB back in. When he reappears all the landscape is gone and he is falling through a landless void, but all the NPCs and mobs are also falling. Then he dies just like you would if you fell into the Twisting Nether in Outland.

OK, I think, I'll release spirit and I'll be back at the graveyard. Err ... No. Instead of his ghost appearing at the graveyard he is alive. Err ... but falling through the sky again. Except I'm not in Kansas anymore. EvilBastard falls to his death, again, but on the grassy plains of Arathi Highlands. Err ... WTF?

So, now he releases spirit once more but he doesn't go to the graveyard, the "Resurrect Now" window appears. Why? Because his body is about 20 feet in the air above his head.

He's standing right next to a big wall made out of logs. Hmmm, what could that be? Yep Hammerfall. Not the most friendly place for a gnome to be!

Resurrect Now! Falling gnome. Luckily it wasn't too far a drop this time and he lands on his feet and without looking back to see if the nasty orcs had spotted him he high-tails it out of there.

Oh, it doesn't stop there. Nope. As he is running away 3 Savannah Prowlers (yep - level 15ish lions from The Barrens) fall from the sky, glitch for a few seconds and then sit back down again. I guess to them a grassy plain in Arathi is not too far removed from a grassy plain in the Barrens, just a little more lush!

Interesting, screenshot or it didn't happen!

On he goes, figuring, sod this I'll just run to Refuge Pointe and fly back to Booty Bay or maybe Wetlands. More prowlers falling from the sky, and what's that up there? There are some of the raptors from the Barrens. And some of those Centaur things with their Hyenas. All looking like they are falling but suspended in mid air. What's that? A bonfire? Yes, there is a bonfire suspended up there too. And that? A chest! Haha. A Kodo and several of the giraffe type things! It looks like the whole of the Barrens has fallen through the floor and is now suspended about 50 feet above Arathi.

Alrighty, I'll put in a ticket and continue getting HotPants to Gadgetzan. She gets there and hands in her quests and collects the next batch and then off to Booty Bay again with me checking back on the progress of EBs ticket every once in a while.

Some time later I get a response from the GM and explain the situation again, I think he thinks I'm more interested in getting a free port back to Barrens, but I really just wanted to make them aware of the animals floating above Arathi!

He says "Hang on, we'll have you sorted in a second, hopefully without even logging you off" and up comes the loading screen and we're in ... Lordaeron! Hahahhahaha.

Off again into the loading screen we're back in the Barrens, not too far from Ratchet. In fact probably the same distance and direction from Ratchet as he'd run from Hammerfall.

Who's that standing next to me in blue robes and a green nameplate? I've never seen an NPC out here. Hang on, that's no NPC - that's a GM*

Time for a /thanks and a quick /inspect. Hehe, no Uber-DPS gear here. I want his gear!!

Hang on. That look looks familiar. Ah yes



*Weird thing about the GM was that the name of the one whispering me was one letter different than the one that stood in front of me. Say for instance the avatar stood in front of me was CornUcopia the one whispering me was CornOcopia. This makes we wonder if they have an avatar but maybe they just create a name to talk to you with

Refer a Friend

So Blizzard have a new encourage multi-boxers recruit a friend scheme. What you do is send yourself friend an invite via the link on the WoW web site and youthey get an email with a 10 day trial key.

YouThey also get a link to download the game which will probably take anywhere from between 6 hours and 3 weeks depending on yourtheir broadband connection, but your already have it so wtf?.

So, once youthey use the key to create their trial account(at this stage youthey don't have to supply payment details, yours and err yourstheir accounts are linked.

This has several advantages:

1. You can summon a player from the other account once an hour
2. For every 2 levels a character on the invitees account earns they can grant a level to a lower level char on the inviter's account.
3. When a character from each account is in a party together they earn triple XP as long as they are the same or lower level. NB. The XP appears to first suffer the grouping penalty and then this modified XP is tripled.
4. When the invitee purchases 30 days playtime the inviter gets 30 days free.
5. When the invitee purchases 60 days playtime the inviter gets a Zhevra mount.
   

(1-3 only apply to characters under 60)

I signed myself up for account number 3. And bought the battle chest for £20 under the assumption that the tight bastards will insist that you buy a retail version for the keys to activate the full account.

...oh and I finally got the shield I mentioned here.

Arena Week #8

Having bought my Season 4 gloves I was very eager to try them out. TiceNits and I only got to get 3 matches done though before we gave up for the week. With a rating of 1180. We is Crap!!

But I did get a mage and a rogue into the 3v3 team (by booting one of the founding members).

We had a good session winning 5 and losing 5. We got 27 points from one match and we finished off with a net increase of rating at exactly 1400. Nice!!

With my resilience at 354 those buggers had a hard time trying to kill me. One team zerged me at the start hoping to get rid of the healer. Oh no you don't. I held out for a very long time before popping my bubble at around 5-10%.

Too late for them they turned on my DPS buddies, but 2 of their number were already down to 10% themselves and were soon finished off.

A couple of times we met a team with 2 mages. Both POM/Pyro specced. That hurt. But what hurt more was the spelllock that they threw on me straight after, so no heal and no bubble. Dead.

A very fun evening to replace a raid with.

Bank Holiday Weekend

It's been late summer bank holiday over here in England today, which usually means that it pisses down with rain the whole weekend.

Well, for once we had a fairly good day here.

So what did I do this weekend? Well I had a wedding reception to go to on friday night, so no Kara run for me.

Saturday morning brings a hangover and a combination of battlegrounds for the Spirit of Competition pet and some shaman levelling.

Saturday evening brings a trip to the boozer...

...leading to massive Sunday morning hangover.

I don't remember doing it at all, but when I got in from the boozer on Saturday Evening I must have logged on and taken my Shaman into AV hoping to get the pet. She did get the pet. My Elephant logs show me getting it out of the mail at 01:37 Sunday Morning!

Whilst struggling with this hangover I get asked to come tank Steam Vaults normal mode.

Respec Prot? You're blooding kidding. I throw the tanking gear on and go tank the whole thing specced holy! I even looted Underworld Loam which for some reason I need for a quest :)

Sunday afternoon is where hair of the dog is required so back to the boozer and this drags on into the evening!

Monday is mostly spent with more shaman and rogue levelling utilising the Tour Guide addon that was mentioned recently on Tauren Army.

I love this addon, you can even go into the data file and add or change things.

I of course had to go in and put various blow job quests in for TiceNits!!

So there you go, no raiding news, links to a couple of great addons, Shaman and Rogue almost complete in Hellfire Peninsula and level 62 or thereabouts and yet more proof of how awesome paladins are, Holy Tanking FTW!

Edit: Typographical errors.

Everyone is doing it, even though it's origins are suspect.

So here is my list...

Look at the list and bold those we have read, italicize those we intend to read and underline^ the books we LOVE.

So here’s my list:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings* - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy^ - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia^ - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune* - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World^ - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary^ - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons^ - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory^ - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (abriged)

* Started but not finished...yet!
^ Can't figure out how to underline
There are no italics. I don't specifically intend to read any, however, I do have the feeling that I should at least read the classics, ie Austen, Dickens, Hardy et al.

21 Read. Oh dear.