Rocket Bear

Everyone needs to equip a rocketpack for the gunship battle. It looks rather goofy for everyone, but for some people more than others:

Dungeon Finder

I have no horrific dungeon finder stories today. Which is just as well. As amusing as they are to recount later they just painful to deal with at the time. All I have to say is that queueing as a tank, the longest part about the queue is waiting for the dps to wake up and click accept on the dungeon.

Not Right

From a Vault of Casino trip earlier this week:

You need to click through and read the chat text and tooltip.

Size differential

It really never fails to amuse me when Mornara, my pigtailed little girl orc, is tanking next to some large male Tauren. She is half their height and at most a quarter of their mass. But still she does just fine with the tanking.

Wintergrasp

A running joke in Darkfall is that Wintergrasp is a horde zone, and that the fortress is Horde property.



I don't think that the Horde and Alliance populations of Hyjal are nearly as out of whack as this screenshot suggests. It seems to be rather a case of the Alliance just not caring. No matter how many stacks of Tenacity they have, a mildly organized Horde group will defend quite well. Especially when there is always coordination in General chat about who is going to take the Southern graveyards and go after their towers.

the inconveniences of consistency

Tylara (looks around Camp Winterhoof): There's no forge here.
Kairon: They're *cow* people.

Ruby Sanctum

The latest and greatest dungeon is Ruby Sanctum. It's very similar to the Obsidian Sanctum. In this case the Black dragon flight has attacked the red dragons. They are led by a full grown twilight dragon. So again you've got 3 slightly less powerful dragon-type bosses and once the last one is dead Halion appears.




Halion is a bastard. He's got 3 phases and the 3rd requires that the raid be entirely split. The 2nd and 3rd phases also have a mechanic in them that can be rather hard. Since it can require continuous movement. This is, to put it mildly, hard on the healers.



I'd put up more screenshots of his words but the closest we got was about 15%. So only destruction for us. Next time I'll point out the trick I read about for his twilight cutter.

Shadow's Edge

Mornara finally got into ICC25 and killed Rotface and Festergut, and lo and behold no one else wanted the Acidic Blood from either of them for The Sacred and the Corrupt. I was shocked, and rather pleased to finally get those. Even if it meant that I bankrupted all of my characters to get the 25 Primordial Saronite and still had to get some from DraNgNon's characters.

Anyway, massive expense aside Mornara now has Shadow's Edge. It is a fabulous weapon and she's got it gemmed and runeforged for tanking. Darion Mograine, the leader of the Death Knights is the one who has set her on this quest. He is rather full of doom and gloom and threats about failure. In the actual quest where he forges Shadow's Edge for you he even straight out says that if you fail at this he will kill you. So no pressure!

The next step is to start the empowerment of Shadow's Edge. A Feast of Souls requires you to kill one thousand of the Lich King's minions. That is a lot of trips to ICC. Fortunately it doesn't matter if you are in 10 or 25 for the kills. Mornara is at a little over 500 at this point. It's taken her several runs so far.

Mornara has also discovered that the Lich King is watching her do this set of quests. He is now fucking with her head. It doesn't happen all of the time and it's not very repetitive. But just about the time she forgets The Lich King whispers her. It's pretty much entirely freaking her out. The last time Mornara got whispers from the Lich King she was still under his control. And she's starting to wonder, what with some of the things he's whispered to her, if getting freed wasn't all a dream...


The Lich King whispers: Never have I had cause to regret sparing your life, mortal. Always, you continue to amuse me.


The Lich King whispers: Take them, mortal, these souls will again be mine soon enough.


The Lich King whispers: Look at you, child; would-be wielder of souls... you can not fathom the power that lies at my command.


The Lich King whispers: The moment is soon at hand, mortal. You shall toil for eternity in a new Azeroth!


The Lich King whispers: Bring me your weapon, champion, that I might feed it the soul of its master!


The Lich King whispers: Remember hero: I, too, once sought a weapon of great power...


The Lich King whispers: I see you too are gathering souls for you own ends. Are we really so different, champion?


The Lich King whispers: Soon, mortal, you too shall have a blade for a prison.


The Lich King whispers: You stumble about in darkness. There is no light here. No mercy! Icecrown has claimed the souls of better heroes that you.


The Lich King whispers: More souls... yes, more... you will find it hard to stop, mortal.


The Lich King whispers: Your heart - its incessant drumming disgusts me. I will silence it as I did my own.


The Lich King whispers: Yes, do it! Create your monstrous new weapon. It too will serve me when your soul is mine.


So, yes, Mornara is rather freaked out by the whispers of the Lich King. However, she is determined to complete her weapon and kill him. Perhaps not in that order...

Mochi Mochi

Kuan and Viljo have set up Saturday night Arena matches. They do their ten 2v2 matches and so far have been hoping not to loose too much. We had a pleasant surprise last weekend when we got the World Wide Winner achieve for finally winning an arena match in each of the five different arenas.


Tonight we were actually doing amazingly well. We won our first match out the door. Just obliterated them with neither of us dying. And that streak kept up pretty well throughout our matches.



Unfortunately after breaking 500 rating we got bumped into the next bracket up. This, unsurprisingly, was a slightly harder bracket, so our wins were tempered by the dual-rogue team violating us with daggers.

We did still manage to end up with a 70% win ratio for the evening. I am convinced that this was Kuan's tiger luck spilling over.

Zulian Tiger

DraNgNon would post this but she is too busy going "SQUEEEE!"



Grats to Kuanchichi!!

Army of...

When killing twilight cultists for the Argent Ren Faire, I mean Argent Tournament, Mornara doesn't bother to pop her Army of the Dead. I mean really, Cult of the Dammned? They practically throw themselves in front of her ax.


This time she went after them with her Army of PENGUINS!! Phear teh penguins!!!!

Epic

It's been a long time since I posted. I've been busy both in game and out. I guess I will catch up one character at a time and then resume my normal posting.

Let's start with Tylara. I've not played her as much as I should, but I've been nudged a bit by the impending Cataclysm. Tylara (along with Kairon) hit 70 almost a month ago.



70 is still a pretty epic achievement, when one is not into power leveling. And no matter how much I try, I just can't power level, even though I intended to with Tylara. But at 70, it was time to pause, anyhow, and make her a little more real. Our first step was acquiring Epic flyers. Both Tylara and Kairon insisted on getting wind riders with armor to match their hair.



As an aside, it means Clara and I have 4 characters each with epic flying. That is a LOT of gold, poof into the vendor's coffers.

Then, I realized that Tylara is still missing keys to some Outland dungeons. I thought this would be no problem, I could just get the rep as part of queing for randoms. But no, it's no longer possible to queue for random normal BC dungeons at 70. Never mind that at least 5 of them are designed for level 70, undergeared groups, to run.

Speaking of undergeared, I also decided to spend the time and gold to get Tylara's blacksmithing skilled up. We had been stashing away many bars of Fel Iron and Adamantite and Cobalt in Bank of Balou, on Mornara, on Eeyan. Tylara ate those up on gear that partly she started wearing but mostly went to DE. Now she is 368 Blacksmithing - well into Cobalt. I confess it is a bit disappointing to have crappy crafted cobalt green gear blow away all those level 70 Armorsmithing recipes.

Then we took Tylara and Kairon into Howling Fjord, where the Epic Flying doesn't matter at all. We haven't really gone much past that, as we both get distracted by playing our other characters. But I still need to get Tylara Sha'tar rep, and a run of normal Botanica and Mechanar, for keying purposes. I confess I don't think I remember the instances well enough to tank them. We should run through them on Mornara and Ikoli to pick up some rep and refresh our memory on the pulls.

Blue Drake

Occulus used to be one of the more annoying heroics in Wrath. People didn't like that you had to ride on drakes and try to kill Eregos. It was hard to navigate in 3D when you weren't sure of where to go. And admittedly before they added scaling to the drakes it was actually hard to kill Eregos. But with the drakes scaling with gear and the current level of gear inflation its actually a pretty easy instance.

However people seem to have built up some sort of allergy to Occulus. They don't like flying on Dragons. They don't wanna have to fly around. So Blizzard started bribing people to go to Occulus. In addition to the regular 2 frost badges you get from completing a random you also get a Cache of the Ley Guardian which always has 2 extra badges, usually has a gem plus, and rarely rarely has Reins of the Blue Drake



Yep, that's Telt on her brand new Blue Drake.

Plague wing

So I've been screenshotting the dialogue from ICC. I dutifully did this for the first wing, and I'm doing it for the Blood and Dragon wings. But I'm having a hard time doing it for the Plague wing.

The first wing, with Marrowgar and Deathwhisper and the gunship battle and Saurfang was really pretty epic. You get a feel for the brainwashing of the Scourge and the epic and continuing battle against both the Scourge and the Alliance. You see the sorrow of Saurfang the Elder and learn about honor from him.

The Dragon Wing seems to be pretty epic as well, You've got a gauntlet with the Argent Crusade and the Ebon Blade working together to clear the path. You're fighting to free a green dragon from the clutches of the lich king. Then you've got to kill Sindragosa, which is quite the epic battle.

The Blood Wing is mostly epic, but has a few silly vampire things in it as well. Compared to their 5-man and quest versions The Blood Princes are oddly difficult to kill when rezzed and buffed by the Blood Queen. The Blood Queen herself is a fun fight, and you get to be a vampire yourself. Thankfully there is not any sparkling.

But the Plague Wing is one big fart joke. Rotface, Festergut, and Professor Putricide are all fart jokes. Rotface "made an angry poopoo." Festergut inhales blight gas until he vomits it all back out. Putricide drinks potions until he farts, throws slime, and generally is disgusting. I'm not feeling the epic or even the mildly heroic in the Plague Wing.