Hearthstone - Quarter 1 - Maexxna

The first 2 bosses were easy sauce, Surely the Spider Queen was going to rip me a new one and lay all her eggs in it. In two weeks I'm going to have a big boil burst and millions of little Maexxnas are going to come flooding out. Yeah?

No! Maexxna went down just as easily as the first two bosses.

What deck have I been using this whole time. The low budge mage deck from Icy Veins.

Here's the screen shot just before I take my final turn...

Kel is a little shocked ...

Yay, another legendary, if a little crap ...

I'm not the only one who thinks that card is a little crap ...

Oh well, time for the Druid and Rogue class challenges which I have just unlocked.

Or maybe not. The whipped my ass! Special indeed ...

Hearthstone - Quarter 1 Boss 2

After the easy first boss I thought it was going to get harder.

It didn't ...

Kel, was nonplussed ...

Another slot opened ...

Hearthstone - Quarter 1 Boss 1

This morning I made my first forays into Naxxramas.

I was a little concerned as on Thursday night the lad had been playing it all night and had failed to get one single boss down :(

So in I go to have a pop at Anub'Rekhan.

Well, I'm happy to report that, as you can see below, he didn't last long!

One shotted!

OK, one down two to go ...

Hearthstone - First Look at Solo Adventures

Tonight, with little time on my hands, I logged into Hearthstone for a quick look at Naxxramas.

First off, when you first open up Hearthstone, you now have a new menu item - Solo Adventures.

I can't remember what was there before. Was there anything?

Right, so when we go into Solo Adventures we get another menu. This menu includes the old practice mode as well as the new Adventure.

Selecting the Naxxramas adventure currently only gives us the Normal mode. We haven't unlocked the other modes yet!

So lets select 'Normal' Mode.

We get told that the necropolis is being opened for the first time. How helpful!!!

The first wing is free! Waheey!! So we get to go into the Arachnid quarter for nuffink! Which is a good job as I thought it was 500g per wnig, but it isn't: it's 700g per wing.

Next time: Inside the Arachnid Quarter.

WoW - The Gaze is Still Active

Tonight I logged in expecting the Gaze of the Black Prince to have finished, but it is still there. I could have sworn it finished on Tuesday. Oh well. I'm not one to look a gift horse, so seeing as it was reset day I did a load more LFR

Pinnacle of Storms
Iron Qon - 1 secret (total: 11)
Twin Consorts - 1 secret (total: 12)
Lei Shen - 1 secret and some loot (total: 13)

Halls of Flesh Shaping
Durumu the Forgotten - Artery Rippers and 1 Secret (total: 14)
Primordius - no secret :(
Dark Animus - 1 secret (total: 15)

Vale of  Eternal Sorrows
Norushen - here a ninja pull caused a wipe - but on the second attempt, although I died, the group did it and got my secret (total: 16)
Sha of Pride - 1 secret (total: 17)

Last Stand of the Zandalari
Council of Elders - 1 secret and some tanking gauntlets (total: 18)

Forgotten Depths
Ji-Kun - 1 secret (total: 19)

The Underhold
Spoils - no secret :(
Thok - Here we had 2 wipes and it was getting late. No-one was listening to tactics so I am going to bed!

1 more secret required :)

Hearthstone - Curse of Naxxramas Released

Last week I saw an announcement that Naxx was coming on the 22nd July, but then I read deeper and it said "for the Americas" /sadface.

When I got home tonight there was a 93MB (approx) patch to download for HS. My heart skipped a beat. It was not long before it was downloaded but then the game wouldn't progress past the title screen and the desktop app said some people were having trouble accessing the game - I sure was!

Later, after downing the second half of ToT and 3/4 wings of SoO I tried again ... I think the image above says it all ...

WoW - Second batch of dungeons

Tonight I did some more Looking For Retards whilst the Gaze of the Black Prince was still active.

I ended up finished ToT and then the first 3 wings of SoS

Halls of Flesh-Shaping - Primordius and Dark Animus
Pinnacle of Storms - Lei Shen

Vale of Eternal Sorrows - Fallen Protectors, Norushen and Sha of Pride
Gates of Retribution - Dark Shaman and General Nazgrim
The Underhold - Spoils of Pandaria and Thok

Giving me 10 Secrets of the Empire

Half way there already!!

WoW - Gaze of the Black Prince

Now that I have made some inroads into the Isle of Thunder I thought it was time to start picking up some Secrets of the Empire, especially seeing as "the Gaze of the Black Prince" has been back for several days and only lasts until tomorrow!

I did the first 2 wings of Throne of Thunder via the Looking For Retard tool.

In the first wing, Last Stand of the Zandalari, I dropped in for the final encounter - Council of Elders - and we one shot it!

Then I queued again, this time for Forgotten Depths and one shot Tortos, Megaera and Ji-Kun!

This gave me my first few secrets of the empire!

WoW - Ku-Mo Quests including Followup Quest - Seeking Father

Towards the end of the Townlong Steppes story line there is a side quest from a Pandaren child called Ku-mo to find his father Father's Crossbow. You need to go and kill a bug guy called Et'Kil, who is just outside the temple, to get the crossbow. Be careful, him and his mates can easily kill you if you are complacent. They got me!

Tactic shamelessly ripped off a wowhead comment ...

"Nearly every class has some kind of CC - Engage by Polymorphing/Hexing one of the adds, nuke down the other. When it begins to cast Caustic Spray just move to the side, they die quick with just over 300k HP. The boss hits moderately hard but can heal up in between attacks, and his Sonic Spike is the circular thing he places on the floor that does MASSIVE damage. Avoid that and you are golden."

Then you take it back to him and he runs off to the temple where Commander Qipan gives you the follow up quest Father's Footsteps which has you pointlessly looking for items belonging to the father (again ripped off wowhead comment) ...

"-Bedroll: Jump down and climb the stairs up north. There will be a room with 'Niuzao Sentinel' in it sleeping. The bedroll is in the middle.
-Shield: Right outside of the bedroll.
-Ha-Cha: Go up the ramp and go to the center where there is stairs going down. Ha-Chan will be the yak."

Now, there is a follow up quest called Seeking Father from Ku-mo back at the Shado-Pan Garrision over the bridge. If you look it up on WoWhead it seems to be coming from a different NPC with the same name. Not only that but it only seems to be available when the dailies send you over to Sra'Vess to do Friends, Not Food!

You don't need to do this for the zone achievement, but as a completionist it's the last quest to do apart from the challenges and the dailies.

And finally, when I gave him the kite to go see his son, he took off and swam in mid-air, without a kite. This really was the most disjointed and seemingly un-tested content of the entire expansion. But it does have a happy ending.

And then Katy Perry arrives - who would have thought?

WoW - Nearly Finished

It's taken a year and a half, and may take even longer, but I am finally knocking off those Pandaria zones!

crazy game sdtor

In the traditions of The Angry Chicken's crazy games stories here is a pretty good one, or at least a story of good luck.

The daily was Warlock or Shaman so my custom low budget warlock was playing a druid.

I got him down quite low to start with and had high health but then we stalled.

He fended me off and was down to 7 health and had 4-5 big cards on the board but I managed to wipe them all out bar 1 - that must have hurt!! But, then we were back to the game of attrition.

It was well past turn 10 and he'd managed to wear me down and I was low on health but I managed to get him down to 1 health and no minions whilst I had a Knife Jugolo(sic) on the board and an Argent Squire without shield (1/1)and a mortal coil in my hand, and was on 3 mana.

So I mortal coiled my own Argent Squire and got a Doomsayer.

Result: I played the Doomsayer for the last 2 mana which triggered the Juggler which won me the game - I bet he was gutted!

Hearthstone - Curse of Naxxramas Out Next Week ... Maybe

I saw on the battle.net desktop app tonight that the Curse of Naxxramas was out on 22nd July - but then I noticed the small print said "in the Americas"!

Really?

Then why put that on the EU desktop app? Surely you can detect which side of the world we are on Blizz?

Well Blizz, what is it?

Alternative Chat

I was listening to a new podcast I found called Alternative Chat.

Here I heard that the Alliance and Horde (and presumably neutral) auction houses are going to merge.

Really?

WoD Beta - The New Quest Log

WoD Beta - Character Copy Progress

Well, my theory that you had to be in the same region didn't immediately bear fruit as I found out yesterday. However, this evening when I logged onto Beta I spotted a new drop down menu at the top of the character copy window in game where you can select region.

However after several minutes it is still sat with the "Copy in Progress" window open and nothing is happening. Hrmph!

So looks like, at least for me, the character copy is still not working :(

WoD Beta - Download Progress

Over the course of the last few days we have gotten down to 6GB remaining! YAY!

WoD Beta - Still downloading ...

The desktop client has just decided it has 12.37GB remaining to download and it has (yet again) gone back to red meaning it is unplayable.

Probably explains why at 20:00 GMT last night all the realms were offline!

WoW - Heart of the Valorous is Back

Yep, back until Monday July 14 at 9:00 CEST!

WoD Beta - Not Finished Downloading

Well last night when I booted up the client finally accepted there was still some downloading to do. So I left it on overnight and it went from 17.6 to 16.4 GB remaining.

I then left it on all day whilst I was at work and when I came home the internet down. When we finally got back on there was no downloading. I'm not falling for this again, it can't have done all 17GB.

Edit: A day later it still won't admit to needing to download anything else!

WoW - Finally Finished Kun-Lai

Last Night MarcusMaximi finally finished Kun-Lai Summit and moved into Townlong Steppes.

The reason being that I didn't level him until the patch hit which increased rep gain during current expansion levelling (Patch 5.4?) so he hit level 90 really quickly whilst still in Krasarang Wilds!!!

I want to do all the content so have been slowly doing the zones and they are becoming easier and easier with SoO LFR gear!!

Last week I finished the PvP battleground and kill the Warlord in the tower parts of the Legendary quest chain and after reading up was concerned that I wouldn't be able to do some of the next steps if I hadn't got Isle of Thunder up to stage 3 or something.

I don't know, but I decided to just get a move on and get all the zones finished anyway.

So, time permitting, over the last couple of days I have been finishing the Divine Bell quest with Anduin and the Kun-Lai zone quests.

Last night I finished the Divine Bell quest which gave me the Operation: Shieldwall Campaign achievement, 10 points and the Grand Gryphon!

Not only that but I already had 99 mounts so that gave me...

Mountain o' Mounts achievement, another 10 points and the Red Dragonhawk mount!

Then I went and did the last few quests in Kun-Lai Summit and got ...

All in all a rather productive evening!

WoW - Sam The Wise

Looks like Sam "Samwise" Didier, the Art Director at Blizzard has got himself into the game. And why not?

That is all.

WoD Beta - How to get Into Warlords of Draenor Beta

I still don't know whether for some bizarre reason I had Alpha access, but now my Battle.net desktop app does actually say Beta, rather than Alpha.

The guys over at The Instance and Convert To Raid were debating last week as to what contributes being a veteran, which grants you an invite to Warlords of Destruction (sic) Beta.

Well, I'll tell you my circumstances.

• I began playing in Vanilla (sorry Koltrane - I mean Classic!!) before the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj patch. 
• I have never let that account's subscription lapse (except maybe a day here and there). 
• I have had a second account since the start of TBC and that has also rarely lapsed and was merged along with my main account into my battle.net account as soon as it was possible to do so. 
• I have a third account which was active for a couple of years but is now dormant. 
• I bought the 1 year subscription to get me into MOP Beta and did actually log into it and use the Beta Account. 
• I have Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 + Expansion on my Battle.net account. 
• I have a Hearthstone account. 
• Very importantly I opted in for the beta.

 So, I think the criteria are:

1. You opted in for Beta
2. You have an active account in good standing
3. You have played since Vanilla 

 There you go, that's my theory. Prove me wrong!

Coming Out - De-cloaking the Holy Warrior

I am going to de-obfuscate my gaming handle on this blog.

The first ever character I created back in Vanilla WoW was a paladin called MarcusMaximi. He is still my main today.

A long time ago, just after I started this blog, I redacted all info relating to my actual in game identity as I thought it may affect my guild standing and my chance at raid spots.

There was only one person who knew of this blog and that was my girlfriend at the time, I called her TiceNits on this blog her real game handle was Greenwood who she later re-named Kaeti.


We had started off on Kul Tiras, EU and moved over to Argent Dawn, EU when we met StupidDorf in real life shortly before TBC hit.

His real handle is Ruffly and he has all manner of alts mostly named around the ruffly meme; he also may have known about this blog.

Greenwood/Kaeti moved over first and joined a guild called Fist Me Nicely (actually called Fist of Outland) a short while later I moved too and took a long time to get to level 70, meanwhile Greenwood was raiding Karazhan.

Around the time I got MarcusMaximi to the heady level cap of 70 the guild fell apart.

Ruffly got us into the guild Rebirth which had been a top end raiding guild but had fallen apart, I referred to it as Afterbirth.

Then we all went to Nighthawks which I referred to as Fucking Tossers as it was the GM - Ardath (renamed hardass) and the RL ( a real life friend of Ruffly) who kicked me out of the guild over their inability to understand the English language, check out this post and this post.

I can't remember the RL's online name but IRL his name is Phil.

I eventually moved onto raiding with Portuguese Porkers who I named as such because the GM and RL/Pally Class lead were Portuguese. This guild was actually called Inner Circle and has gone through several changes of guild leadership since I stopped raiding with them back in WotLK

The Pally Class lead I called NicePallyClassLeader her real name was Naruriel, she has since left the game and had a baby! I named my Hunter pet after her!

Then GW/Kaeti and I parted ways IRL just as Inner Circle were starting into Sunwell which is when I stopped raiding and got into my gold making. I remained in Inner Circle and made 3 million gold before the end of WotLK.

This was when I met (in game) the only other person that knew about this blog, a guildie called Caz her blog is over at Cazmia's Ramblings.

I have now left Inner Circle, as it was a ghost town, and joined BoringAss' new guild Libertas de Dominatus.

So there we have it, I don't think there is anyone else to 'out' except BoringAss whose real in-game name is Boreas!

WoD Beta - Fix For The CAS system was unable to initialize

TL;DR at the bottom ...

When I first got into Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Whateva the battle.net client told me it was downloading 26GB.

I was verty surprised that after less than 15-20 minutes on my 512KB - 1MB broadband connection I had got to playable stage.

When I went to bed that night I left it downloading and the following evening it was still at around 22GB to download.

The next day it didn't try to download anything but after a restart it went back to 22GB remaining. So before I went away for the weekend I booted up the desktop app again hoping for 2 days of uninterrupted broadband to download a size-able chunk. Except the client said it was at v6.0.xxx again so nothing to download. I left it on anyway!

When I got back I tried to boot up Beta and after waiting with the client telling me the game was running for some time I eventaully got the green WoD icon appear on my taskbar, but all that was telling me was ..

The CAS system was unable to initialize: CASInitialize() timed out waiting for container creation mutex.

Mutex??? What the ???

CAS is the new file system that is replacing MPQs in WoD. This system allows for smoother patching and better client/server stuff apparently as well as speeding things up. Well not today.

I had had this problem when I first installed the beta and found the solution on the interwebs, maybe it was something to do with deleting a load of files or restating; but I'd forgotten exactly what though so had to re-search.

Unfortunately this time I had no luck except for a cheeky blue post on the official forums saying ...

Cheeky!

Well, I tried deleting some cache files and restarting the client and no go. Eventually I rebooted my system, still no joy.

TL;DR
The solution I found was to go into options and select the "use 32 bit Client" this worked and I have an inkling this was the solution I found last time and an update must have overwritten those settings.

WoD Beta - Ingame Character Copy: Can't Copy Won't Copy

I've been trying to copy MarcusMaximi over to the Beta to see how he performs and to get a heads up on the quests he will be facing when Warlords of Destruction (sic) finally does to come but I can't copy him over.

I never even tried to copy a character over for MoP. I created a Pandaren Monk and tooled around the starting area with him a bit but that was about it, I was at an all time WoW interest low at the time.

Now, however, I want to get MM over to check out what he's going to be like; but I can't.

I've looked at the account management page on my battle.net account and it says the character transfer is down for maintenance.

Several blue posts say that the character copy has now moved into the client but it does work.

Well, I go back into the game and yes there is a window and a button to copy in live account data. Except when I use it it says 'copy has failed'.

Very frustrating. More searching suggest that you need to empty you characters mail box and log into them so that the armoury refreshes if you haven't done that for a while.

None of these work for me. :(

Edit: The latest info I have gleened is that it may be because my account is EU and the server I am on is US. I'll try it on Mekkatorque tonight.

WoD Beta - NPC: Friend or Foe and Level 90.

One of the things I had heard of about WoD was that the way that NPCs (and maybe PCs as well) are shown to you will change so that as soon as you mouse over them the will be surrounded by a shining hue to identify whether they are friendly or aggressive.

Here you can see my newbie orc hunter talking to one of the friendly NPCs surrounded by his eerie green glow.

A little while later I managed to create a level 90 template character on Gilneas called Ed - It's nice to be able to create a 2 character name.

The first thing he saw was a massive Khadgar standing at the gates of Stormwind and I think he wanted me to go to the Dark Portal. So off I went.

After waiting around for a not inconsiderable amount of time most things had loaded. But most of the Dark Portal was just plain and gray, like plain concrete. I hope this is just textures they haven't added yet!

So I picked up a quest and went off to kill things with my unimpressive number squished damage not seeming to do a heck of a lot of damage. Here you can see the aggressive red glow of an Iron Horde Orc.

After a little while I realised I hadn't chosen a spec or talents or, well, anything - Ooops!

Once I had figured that things started going a lot smoother!

Hearthstone - Opening 20 Card Packs

I got my 20 packs either buying them or earning them in arena so tonight I opened them.

Along with a Giant I also got THREE legendaries. Bloodmage Thalanos, Grommash Hellscream (warrior legendary) and The Black Knight!!

One pack I opened I got a legendary, an epic and 2 rares!

Good Times :)

Hearthstone - Frozen Ragnaros

So if you are playing as a mage and your opponent throws down Ragnaros what would you do?

Well, If you have anything with a freeze on it that would be your lifeline, wouldn't it?

Nope, at the end of your turn you get hit in the face for 8 damage by a frozen Ragnaros! Great!

WoD Beta - The Toy Box

There you go. Your first look at the toy box. Looks a bit empty to me, but then again this was on my new level 1 Orc Hunter.

The Orc Hunter is now up to level 6 or so and wandering over to have a chat with Voljin.

Check back soon to see what he's up to.

Next time on WoW WoD Wroundup - new character Highlighting and level 90 quests.

Hearthstone - New Season - NO RECORD FOUND

I logged on tonight and was advised that in June 2014 I attained the Rank of Raid Leader. I already knew that!

Then I was told that the "NO RECORD FOUND" season has begun. LOL!

Anyone else see that?