Where's my WOTLK...

Amazon.UK is not being ASAP... I want my WOTLK here and now ;)

WoW is so well known nowadays, that even Publico, the maintream newspaper in Portugal is talking about WOTLK, here.

Commenting the news, it's nice to see I'm not the only oldie to play this game. I find it funny that other adults find weird when I talk about it... then they call it a child's game and go on with their lives.. and so do I... still, I think it's so sad to grow and discover that Santa doesn't exist, that money doesn't come from machines. One thing is sure , though... playing takes a lot of real time from your real life... and when you have 40, you have spent 50% of your real life... so.. why bother with a game when you can do it for real ? Something to consider..



Meanwhile, yesterday I bought the rest of the mount pack to get over the 50 mounts and I'm now the proud owner of an Albino Drake !

Pre-WOTLK fun : The AQ scepter quest line

This week I started doing something I've been wanting for so long, which was to complete the AQ scepter quest, while waiting for WOTLK.

There is a great guide on WoWWiki, so all you have to do is follow it.

The first step is getting neutral with the Nozdormu dragons. Pre-TBC I ended up as hostile, and also never got Broodlord's head as it was a single person drop for a 40-raid.
Well, recently, thanks to oldschool achievement runs, I was able to improve my rep to get the head and get "friendly"
(btw, I also finished BWL, I'm now a Classic Raider !).

So I was given the quest to talk to Anachronos, and the quest line starts.



The start is a nice script at the AQ gates showing Anachronos and Staghelm closing the AQ gates to block the Silithid pre-WoW invasion.

Basically there are three shards that recreate the scepter (so that we reopen the AQ gates and go down to kill C'Thun and stop all the silithid madness) that you need to get.

A- The green scepter shard line I still have to do.

B- The red scepter shard line I stupidly didn't do yet because I started one week later than I should ( I hope to do it!) and requires a 5-hour BWL run after talking to Vaelastrasz. Well, runs are now taking about 1-1.5 hours so...all you need is a tank with Onyxia cloak and 20-30 non-idiots that know when to hide behind Nefarian's throne when he lands.


C- The blue scepter shard line is the one I'm doing. It involves talking to Azuregos, Anachronos, Dirge and Narain Soothfancy in Tanaris.
They send us going to an off-map island south of Tanaris using a devious way to overcome fatigue (water walking will probably do that too but I did it the oldschool way). Then we must get Narain's Scrying Googles from MC, kill Dr. Weavil's elite monkey in Winterspring, and kill Lord Lakmaeran and farm his minions in the Isle of Dread. Then it get's harder.



The three items one must obtain for this shard are Narain's Scrying Goggles (got them !), 500 Pound Chicken (got it with the Recipe: Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops, the only epic WoW cooking recipe... afaik! I didn't sell it, ofc, but its value is over 1K gold, probably more now) and finally, assemble "Draconic for Dummies: Volume II".
Volume II is made of 8 chapters, each one hidden in a remote place in Azeroth.
Chap. I - Alcaz Island, must kill Dr. Weavil. I tried that once soloing him and no way, he minds controls you and that's it. Should be able to do it with healer and pet.
Chap. II - Blasted Lands elite fel/doomguards drop it. Farm farm farm (and these guys kick us hard.. enslaving is the way)
Chap. III - Hederine elite guys in Winterspring drop it. Same as above.
Chap. IV - Undercity.. hehehe it's going to be fun.
Chap. V - Stormwind.. bah.
Chap. VI - Onyxia drop. Got it !
Chap. VII - BWL on a table next to Firemaw. Got it !
Chap. VIII - Ragnaros drop. Tried to get it and........ failed !!!! And why ?

The story goes that chap. I/VI/VIII boss drops are white items. Therefore they are part of the round-robin loot table and cannot be master-looted.
So, you have to ask the raid leader to change the loot rule to 'Free for all', or, to ask every member to check boss' corpse even they don't have this quest. In the latter case, a single logged or HSed member may make your effort in vain.
Now, imagine what happens with a Molten Core 35-pug-raid with a bunch of idiots ? Of course no one's gonna loot it, some will not even be there, others will HS or leave party 1 sec after they get the stupid achievement...
I joined a raid, leader went d/c, someone got leadership, Strik, an idiot from Frostmane, I spent 1 hour summoning 30 guys into MC and in the end, when I asked him to set FFA, and explained why, and he said no. So I asked everyone to loot Ragnaros after fight... guess what happened.... of course the default looter never looted, so I got no item. Option 1, call him FILHO DA PUTA out loud, and possibily get banned. option 2, breathe slowly, think it's just a silly game, and try again, next time as RAID LEADER !!! My problem is that we're getting close to WOTLK and with "Saved instance" status, I only have Wednesday to try that. Afterwards, it might be hard to get a raid going, same thing with BWL 5-hour run. May be not, those creating DK's will want to go for oldschool achievements.

Well, the Scepter quest line doesn't end with the shards, but for sure the shards are the hardest part. Or may be not, the last part requires Elementium Ores from BWL. At 80 one may probably go with a 2/3-party to the 1st boss and farm the Technicians near Vaelastrasz. Buying from AH... nah, epics are $$$ (200g for a single one atm).

Don't miss the next episode, where I'm going to dualbox the Stranglethorn Arena during early hours to grab the Arena achievements.

ETA 7 days.. and counting

I've ordered my WOTLK from Amazon long time ago. Now I regret I didn't order a collector's edition for Netcownt. Screw it. I hope it gets here 1-2 days after the release at most.

I've decided to level Netcownt and Tarithel first to 80, going for the Seers title and 3000 quests done. The 800 I'm missing will be completed in Northrend.

As for horde, I'll move Cornelius and Clarabela to Burning Steppes server , where I'll try and go into my mate João's guild. Those guys did MC and ZA in greens.. this time, they r going for 10-dungeon server 1st kill. It'll be hard to level 4 in a row, but one will try.




As preparation, I've been focusing on leveling accomplishments for Netcownt, mostly in classic. I'm missing the oportunity to go heroic dungeons but... the boredom of going to Mechanar, Steamvault, and all those crappy design dungeons only for that.. is too much for me. I truly disliked TBC dungeons except Karazhan.

On the opposite side, I love classic raiding. I've been revisiting AQ40, AQ20, ZG, MC, only BWL to go, can't find a proper team, and when I find one.. I'm saved! I've downed Nefarian with Tarithel, but not with Necownt. /cryalot.



I've got ~2300 accomplishment points, atm, very few ppl have those, even those that downed most TBC raid bosses. Classic dungeon master, 15 exalted reputations, Ambassador, Hallowed. ~50K honor kills, Justicar and Classic raider are around the corner.




And as fun motto, on the profession side I've fished Lurker, alone in the middle of the SSC pool. LOL. Too easy. Ah, and Gazh'kanka in ZG, too. I've also got Old Ironjaw after ~50 catches. Now, for the harder fishing part, Orgrimmar is the way. Naked is the way to go !

I also got enough runes during the 2nd Scourge Invasion to get all the item from Argent Dawn (exalted already :-)), and all 4 cloth epics. I'm a true Argent Dawn knight ! I'm only missing the Baron's horsey.. but it'll come. My luck concerning mount drops is terrible. No brewfest ram, no headless horse, with over 20 tries.

Ah, nearly forgot. Retried Onyxia dualbox. Got the Phase 1 done in ~15 mins, but then entered a brainless stage for a few seconds and got myself killed in Phase 2. Must learn to avoid the fire bombs, and SoC the first dragonfly waves faster, all that while keeping the VW (with 15 K LOL) alive. So, it's doable. I'll try again at 70sh.. may be 72 as solo demonlock.

Ah, and Tarithel got AQ20's Ossirian's head. Yay !

WOTLK is coming !

Yay ! Three times yay !

The 3.0.2 patch came up and with it a lot of excitement.

- Toon overpowering at 70 to allow ppl with (more) real lives (sort of... lol, so called newbs by the so called game experts that don't know what is a flying pyramid doing on top of Stormwind) and those with not so many skills or not so much time to spend raiding, to see end game raiding content, namely, Kara, ZA, SSC,TK, BT). It was a nice move from Blizzard, better than what they did last time, effectively forcing ppl to go and get private servers to see it or wait 2 years. But then again, I noticed there is a multitude of opinions on this.

- My guild downed Vashj, and Netcownt went up to Shahraz in Black Temple, did Gruul and Magtheridon. Not too different from a private server lol... except I have a /kill button. A pity I missed the Champion of the Naaru prequest heroics.

- New talents look nice, I'm training demonic mode for Netcownt. It'll rock soon.

- Achievements. Yay ! I have a lot of them done, ~2000 points. I'm focusing 100% on Netcownt atm, the rest of the toons can wait. Major achievements I want are lore based, and pre-tbc based, since I actually hated all the tbc lore and raid crap. I've ran ZG, AQ20, AQ40, MC, and missing BWL (I went with the guild to try doing it, got saved for 3 days, wiped on Vael with 10 men, and missed a proper BWL 40x70 raid in the next day due to that. stupid move, rememember not to do it again).
It's weird most of my pre-tbc achievements were not recorded by Blizzard (e.g. ZG,MC). Oh well no worries, Ragnaros came down in 20 seconds !!!

- Scourge event again ! I remember when Tarithel was 55, she went 55-60 with my friend Mike the Mage on Skullcrusher. He AOE'd, I healed', I got a big big boost back then. This time the event is better. Amazing zombies. I went to Crossorads and plagued it all over the horde lowbies. Tons of fun, and u can talk to them too. I even infected the innkeeper and flight master lol.

- Halloween boss. I missed it last year due to WoW break, but this year I got it all except (up to now) the epic mount.

The bad part of all this ?
- I won't have time to see some end-raiding.
- My main Frostmane server is full, 1300 alliance on Sunday evening. I'm starting to see options for RP-PVP for WOTLK on my battlegroup. Ravenholdt looks promising (half the population), and Boulderfist a nice server to level 70-80 and achieve my Fishing Extravaganza. It has 1/5 of the population of Frostmane.
- No time to level inscription
- No time to level Wowforsaken
- No time for my Justicar... it's stalled with 200 flags to go.

Time to update my pre-wotlk lore book. Arthas is coming !

patch and TBC for kiddo's

I'm back for a few considerations about the latest patch.

On one hand, it rocks: graphically, it improved by miles. Stormwind Harbor is flabbergasting. The barber shop is fun. The details are way better, we can now see things on the walls that were blurred before. My fps didn't suffer... until now, and "if" (in my case) shadowing is disabled. Good job here.

On the other hand, TBC "standard" gaming is over. 70's can now pvp-kill other 70's in 2-shots.... DPS are tanking trash in BT, as one dude in my guild said happened last night with them... and if Blizz doesn't decrease the legendary drop rate, some pro guilds are gonna be quite pissed off...

I tried a few games with my 66 huntard, and truly, I saw some 65+ retradin dmg dealers do insane dmg. Dunno if it's because of the talent tree. Whatever it is, it's just... quite different from old-tbc. I guess we have to wait until 80 to see wether that scales "down", otherwise it's not going to be much fun, specially for clothiers vs unexpected enemies.

The one thing that I LOL'ed is the decrease by 30-40% of XP needed to level 60 to 70. Today I went 64-66 in a few hours of gameplay and I haven't even entered Nagrand. I guess Nagrand will push me to 68-69. And then Kirin'Tor village will be enough to ding 70. All in all, a bit of a joke, but thank you Blizzard.

Other LOL'ing are the skill leveling dummies. Blizz might as well legalize bots to speed things up! Or just give us 400 skill for all weapons.

No WOTLK !

I had to test the 3.0.2 WOTLK patch, only to check if the east asians and fat coke american coders had for once succeeded in deploying stabe Software.

The usual sh*t.

You can't fly, you can't ride, you can't logout, there are no lifts, no bg's, no portals in Shattrah.. etc etc.

The only stable thing was the new achievements browsing.

Way to go Blizzard.

Will try again tomorrow...


[Me in WSG as the 11th man... killing the other 10 horde, stuck at entrance. Weeeee]

No WoW

Due to the incoming financial meltdown and the consequent apocalypse, my time is now fully spent short-selling Nasdaq-100 futures and ripping off the n00bs that still have stoxx on their hands, so for now f*ck Warcraft. NQZ8 ftw !