Ok so that patch last night, or yesterday I suppose, depending on when you logged on to the WoW, seemed to screw with a lot of peoples interface and WoW mechanics.  I don’t know, it took me a couple of restarts for the download to even begin, and I certainly wasn’t expecting it, so luckily I loggedon a bit eary before the scheduled raid of 25 Ulduar, I need to get a 10man sometime for that smexy staff that Yogg drops, anyways, I wasent late because I tried to log on early, and managed to finish just in time.  I don’t even know what that stupid patch was for, but whatever.  I heard that it was background information for the citadel, which is cool, but yeah.

It made like half the raiders late, some were never able to log on, there were a lot of DC’s going on, so for about half an hour we were waiting around the entrance to Ulduar ganking horde, ahaha I would lay down alone on the ground, two rogues steatlhed near me, and sure enough horde would just come and attack me haha, they would get sapped and the guild would decend on the unsuspecting horde groups.  It is good fun for bored people haha.

Finally we gave up on Ulduar due to lack of people, and were dicussing what we should do, all sorts of old BC raids were popping up, we decided on the Sunwell, since it sounded all badass n what not.  I had never done it before, like most BC raids with the exclusion of Karahzan. 

I planned on goofing off a bit in the raid, so I brought my RP gear to heal in haha, always fun, and we set out, it was a pretty tough at first getting down the pulls n what not, because people were goofing off, I had to get into my real healing gear and keep people alive.  The fights were pretty easy with the gear levels we had and the dps we were putting out, it was just figuring out how to coordinate the fights, all the while people were DCing and some had been on before the patch was applied and then had to download it before being able to log back on.  I have to say though, that this raid really must have lived up to its fabled reputation as hella hard at 70.  We can only hope that Icecrown Citadel will be like sunwell and not like ToGC because then it would actualy be a challenge to kill the Liche King.

Crack that one down for the acheivment!  Woot!

One of the last quests you do in Eversong Woods has you defend this. It’s a Runestone, which you use an arcane-infused crystal to reactivate, and then defend from a few waves of undead. It’s to the south of the zone, near the Ghostlands, which is teeming with trolls and plagued beasts and undead zombies and loads of stuff like that, so it feels like a dangerous area – I’ll be writing about that tomorrow.

I mentioned the Runestones in my Sin’dorei lore post – they’re magical monoliths that provided a kind of arcane shield against invaders. The Scourge destroyed a lot of them, and others have been stolen – another symptom of the decay in blood elf society since the defiling of the Sunwell by Arthas, since presumably they’ve been stolen so that desperate blood elves can sate their magic addiction by siphoning their energy. It’s quite an easy quest, but I have great memories of it because it’s one of those that puts you right in the middle of the action and makes you the hero.

Ancient runestones once powered a protective barrier across the Eversong border. Many were destroyed during Arthas’ attack; others were stolen.

Of the three that remain, only this one has retained its powers. The runestone to the east might be salvageable, though.

Take this crystal and instill its energy on the Eastern Runestone. The process should take but a minute. Beware though, nearby Scourge will be drawn to it and will seek to destroy it. Do not let them!

This kind of quest doesn’t seem so cool when it’s your first character and you’re attempting to kill two mobs at a time (remember, this is me, who couldn’t cast Shadow Word:Pain, turn around, and run away so that the DoT would tick on the mob for a bit before it got to me until I was at least level 20 – I just didn’t have the dexterity to be able to turn) but when you’ve quested for a bit outside of the areas implemented in the Burning Crusade – eg anywhere that isn’t Eversong Woods or the Ghostlands, for the Horde – you soon come to appreciate them. Mostly because there’s a real improvement on how Blizzard design their quests – if you compare the Ghostlands and the Barrens, there’s far less of the ‘Bring me 80 raptor beaks’ kind of quest in the first zone, and far more of the ‘Great hero, please accomplish this essential task for me!’

The second kind of quest is far more rewarding, both in terms of time invested – killing tigers over and over, some of which magically seem to have no hearts or tongues or whatever you’re looking for, is not exactly fun after the first five minutes – but also in terms of personal pride, or what’s sometimes called e-peen. E-peen is what you get a boost to if you accomplish something tricky – get a Frostwyrm mount, kill the last boss in the game, clear Sunwell, etc etc – and although objectively getting a Frostwyrm and completing this quest would seem to be completely different levels of achievement, subjectively, they aren’t. To some new players, killing single mobs is easy enough, but managing to kill two mobs at the same time gives them a real sense of pride – I know, I was one of them. I’d imagine it’s the same for those who are really skilled at Arena – being able to kill other players is easy enough, but being able to kill lots of them, using different tactics, and being so good at it that you get a special mount as a reward is different. The only real difference between the two, in my eyes anyway, is that the game chooses to give the Arena player a physical item to recognise their achievement, whereas for the newbie the warm fuzzies are the only reward.

Even better, from the point of view of a lore-lover, these are important tasks your character is accomplishing – you’re helping to reconstruct the defenses of your kingdom, it’s hardly the kind of job that gets given to just anyone. For these players, so the sense of achievement is on two levels. The quest, which is technically challenging enough to new players to at least be fairly difficult, gives you the glow when you’ve done it, and your character is also being venerated in the game world for taking on such a difficult and dangerous task and succeeding. For players that identify strongly with their characters, that’s double the pride.

Incidentally, it’s fairly widely accepted that, in the old world at least, the Horde have a lot more ‘Kill 300 of X’ quests, and the Alliance have a lot more of the kind where you personally have a very important task to do, whether you’re patrolling with the Nightwatch in Duskwood or defending the Dark Portal in Nethergarde Keep. There could be a lore reason behind this – members of the Horde are seen as mere peons compared to their commanders, whereas the Alliance have a lot more respect for individuals and their achievements. Alternatively, the quest designers could have just had more ideas for the Alliance, or preferred the Alliance, and designed the Horde quests as an afterthough. Who knows?

What is certain is that Northrend has some of the best quests in the game. Maybe I’m just thinking about quests a lot recently, sicne I’m not far off completing Loremaster, but there is a huge differnce between the quests in that zone and how complex they are compared to the original game. If you haven’t played through it, and you have a level 72+ character, go and do the Wrathgate quest chain right now. Again, I’ll be blogging more about that later – suffice it to say for now that Wrathgate, with the possible exception of the Ahn’Qiraj opening questline (another one you should go and start right now) is the best questline in the entire game and is a real culmination of all those little points at which you’re playing the hero of your race and faction. Th e same applies to the Death Knight starting quests.

Anyway, I’ve got to go and collect 27 hyena fangs for a tauren in the Barrens, so I’m leaving it here for today.

~Farf

Ranger blessed: 1/4.

Yesterday’s post seems kind of well-timed now because last night I finally accomplished something that I’d wanted to do ever since I picked up the game. My server finally had its instance servers fixed, meaning you can run them now, and so last night I headed into the Molten Core, WoW’s original raid instance, with a couple of guildies to see what we could take down. We cleared the place pretty quickly, and to my utter delight, I picked up a couple of pieces of Tier 1 and the Eye of Divinity from Majordomo’s Cache.

The Eye of Divinity is a priest-only trinket that, when you equip it, allows you to see NPCs you couldn’t see otherwise (including Ricole Nichie, ex-Socialite, standing next to Haris Pilton in the World’s End Tavern in Shattrath.) However what I was most interested in was heading off to the Eastern Plaguelands so I could see Eris Havenfire, who offers you a quest.

The lore behind this quest is utterly amazing. Basically, Eris Havenfire was a priestess who attempted to save residents fleeing the town of Stratholme while Arthas Menethil destroyed it after being taunted by Malganis. She failed when she was overwhelmed by the corpses of the villagers she was trying to save, as they were reanimated as the Scourge. Now you have to seek redemption for her, by accomplishing what she failed at.

You equip the trinket and accept the quest The Balance of Light and Shadow.

You must do what I could not: Save the peasants that were cut down while fleeing from Stratholme.

They will walk towards the light, you must ensure their survival. Should too many fall, our cursed existence shall continue – you will have failed.

Every ability, prayer, and spell that you have learned will be tested. May the Light protect you, Farfalla.

You have to do this on your own – if anybody else helps in anyway, a demon spawns that hits for about 8k and cannot be killed, which obviously promptly wipes the party.

So you do the quest (and can I just say, I cannot imagine how hard this would have been at 60? It was still a test at 80). Villagers spawn, some of which have diseases on them, and they’re being attacked by spectral archers (who can’t be killed) and skeletal warriors (who can.) They walk from the mouth of a cave towards a pool of light about fifty yards away, and you have to save 50 of them before 15 are slain. You cure the disease on the diseased ones, Renew them all, Holy Nova the skeletons, and then dash back to the start where more waves are spawning (I found out the hard way that if you don’t, if you stay with them to the end, you lose too many of the new wave.) I failed it once (probably because I was busy taking screenshots) at which Eris Havenfire despawned and didn’t come back for 20 minutes (and I was stuck in combat, which meant no mana potion for the next try.) When she respawned, however, I knew what I was doing, and I completed the quest.

!!!

What do you get as a reward? A Splinter of Nordassil, Nordrassil being the World Tree. When combined with the Eye of Divinity and the Eye of Shadow (which I already had, it drops off high-level demons and Doom Lord Kazzak), they get combined into Anathema/Benediction.

Anathema/Benediction is the iconic priest weapon, so you can imagine I was absolutely psyched to get it. Benedicton is the holy side of the staff, and looks like this:

Farfalla in her Tier 6 with Benediction.

Whereas Anathema is the dark side, and looks like this:

Anathema.

Obviously, the two sides reflect the two sides of a priest’s powers: shadow magic and holy magic. You switch between the two by clicking the staff.

Now, the reason I think this is interesting (other than being a gigantic lore dork and feeling very strongly about my priest, having played her for two and a half years) is because yesterday I wrote about class quests, of which this is the ultimate, in my opinion. These quests are closely tied to the class design and philosophy of WoW.

Things like the Anathema/Benediction questline point to Blizzard’s original intention when designing classes. They all had their niche, mostly being drawn from other fantasy genres like Dungeons and Dragons. Warriors were tanks, priests were iconic healers, rogues epitomised skill with weapons, warlocks were demonic summoners, mages were masters of the arcane, shaman were masters of the elements, paladins were attuned to the Light, druids were at one with nature, hunters lived in balance with the land. Like I said yesterday, all these classes had special questlines and lore behind them. Warlocks spend levels 1-60 learning how to summon different kinds of demons, increasing in power all the time, until at level 60 they’re able to take part in a long, difficult questline to summon a demonic steed to ride. Similarly, paladins go on a journey that teaches them how to use the Light to help others – a questline that involves helping a wounded soldier, at the end of which they’re worthy of using the Light to resurrect the fallen; a questline that has you defend a woman whose husband was sent away by war and who is now defending their farm from invaders, at the end of which you learn to sense undead. Finally, you master the light enough to call a Charger from it, which is also obtained via a long and time-consuming, difficult questline. Even better, with the introduction of Horde paladins, Blood Knights, Blizzard were careful to differentiate the lore between the Blood Knights and the Silver Hand – members of the Silver Hand worship the Light, while the Blood Knights subjugate it. The paladins of the Silver Hand have a questline which gives them a weapon – they have to collect a purified Kor gem, along with some lumber and refined ore. The Blood Knights, on the other hand, have to collect a corrupted Kor gem, the blood of the wrathful, and the insignia from a dead paladin. There’s a real difference between the two factions.

The thing is that questlines like this are now, for the most part optional. You learn Redemption as a paladin without doing the quest; the same with Sense Undead. The same again with the mounts for both warlocks and paladins. Similarly, druids no longer have to do a long questline to learn Cure Poison. Priests used to take part in two quests to learn their racial abilities – these have now been removed. These racials were great, tiny little bits of lore – blood elves had Touch of Weakness, a magical debuff which weakened the melee power of their enemies, and Consume Magic, which consumed a magic buff on the priest to return mana, both of which fit perfectly with their dependency on magic. Night elves had Starshards, calling down the stars of Elune, their goddess, to harm their enemies, and Elune’s Grace, which temporarily reduced their chance to be hit by attacks, perfectly in line with the night elf ability to stealth and their increased dodge chance. Forsaken had Touch of Weakness and Devouring Plague, a disease DoT – perfect lore-wise since the Forsaken were mostly killed by the plague themselves. And so on.

With Wrath of the Lich King, these racials were removed. Instead, all priests were given a nerfed version of Desperate Prayer (the Dwarf/Human racial which gave an instant heal) as a talent in the Holy Tree, and Symbol of Hope (the draenai racial which restored mana over time), renamed to Hymn of Hope and made a level 80 channelled ability, restoring 3% of mana over time for up to 3 nearby friendly low mana party or raid members. The justification for this was that the racials were too difficult to balance.

It was true that there were certain racials which were more useful and powerful than others. Dwarves originally had their racials as Desperate Prayer and Fear Ward, a ten minute buff with no cooldown which would consume one fear effect. Certain fights (Nightbane in Karazhan, Archimonde in Mount Hyjal) were immeasurably easier with this buff, which eventually led to Blizzard reworking the spell, giving it to all priests as a 3 minute buff with a 3 minute cooldown. Certainly Chastise (the racial they replaced Fear Ward with, and also available to Draenai, a 2 second root) was much more useful in PvP than Consume Magic, which could actually be dangerous in both PvP and PvE because you had no control over what buff it dispelled – if it dispelled Power Word: Fortitude, you’d have to rebuff it anyway, wasting two global cooldowns and most of the mana you’d got back. It’s also true that Blizzard looked at their game at the end of the Burning Crusade and decided that it was too class-based, and that instead you should be able to ‘bring the player, not the class’.

As such, at the same time they removed priest racials, Blizzard decimated the class-specific abilities they had created. Totems became raid-wide rather than party-wide, so that you didn’t specifically need an enhancement shaman for the melee party but could have a restoration or elemental shaman drop Windfury totem instead. Shadow priests lost their niche (restoring mana to their party as a percentage of their damage done), as a new effect, Replenishment, was added to the game, restoring a percentage of mana on up to 5 targets every five seconds. This effect could be procced by survival hunters, shadow priests, retribution paladins and now destruction warlocks, too. Salvation, a blessing that paladins could buff on the raid that reduced threat, and which was an absolute necessity for DPS players, as well as the ability to manage threat, was removed, as tank threat generation was far increased. Certain fights were also changed – the main one being Illidan, who had his Shear effect removed. Shear did a massive amount of damage to the tank and had to be Shield Blocked, which meant only Paladins and Warriors could tank him – Druids, originally, were out of luck. To make up for their loss of niche utility, which had historically been compensated by the unique buffs they brought, hybrid classes had their DPS increased. And, most importantly of all, certain buffs were made identical, so that only one of them could be on the target at a time. Improved Divine Spirit was identical to Totem of Wrath, so the one would override the other, just as Improved Blessing of Wisdom is overwritten by Improved Mana Spring Totem.

You can sort of see why Blizzard would do this. The amount of class stacking in Sunwell was, to be fair, a bit insane. Shamans were wanted for their Bloodlust, and you’d bring three at least, for their amazing ability to heal the high amounts of raid damage going around. Similarly, holy priests were in a good place, because they could both tank and raid heal, whereas paladins were more limited in their abilities (although they were still excellent tank healers, much better than priests; they just couldn’t do both.) Two or three shadow priests were ideal, despite their low DPS, to bring the mana restore effect. There was no real place for mages, because warlocks synergised much better with shadow priests and their shadow damage debuff placed on the boss. Specs like ret paladins were only really useful on niche fights like Brutallus, because their Judgment of Light did so much healing on the melee; their DPS wasn’t good enough to justify bringing more than one, and then only if you had enough rogues to make up for their loss. Rogues! Rogues did insane damage whereas arms and fury warriors lagged behind, as did cat druids and moonkin. All this meant that raids were bringing classes rather than players, and those who were playing an underpowered class were being passed over, which was not a state Blizzard wanted the game to be in.

So they homogenized a lot of stuff. There are just two problems with that, from my point of view.

Firstly, the amount of class stacking being done by guilds like mine (which was 5% off being 2/6 in Sunwell when it disbanded in July 2008) was not, repeat not, that insane, when you take into account that we were a raiding guild. Sure, Nihilum were bringing 10 warlocks, 5 shamans, 3 priests, two warrior tanks and the rest rogues to their raids, so that they could get world firsts, but we weren’t because we weren’t interested in that. For a semi-serious raiding guild, we went with what we had. We never had a shadow priest in our raids until Sunwell, and we only had one then, because we just couldn’t recruit one. Similarly, we used a druid to tank Illidan before his Shear ability was removed, because we didn’t have a warrior available that night. I promise you, if you were skilled enough, there was nothing that the lack of one class or the other prevented you from doing. Of course, we weren’t saying ‘Retri paladins! Come raid with us, we’ll bring you all!’ We were a raiding guild and we had a good class balance in most of our raids. But we weren’t incapable of working with unusual specs if that was what we had, and when Ghostcrawler said that tanking Illidan with a bear was impossible, we proved him wrong. So when you see it being stated that class balance was out of control in the Burning Crusade, I promise you that it’s hyperbole.

And secondly, what about the lore? What about all the things that distinguish your class, your race, from all the others? Maybe it’s because I identify so strongly with Farfalla, but I play my priest as a Blood Elf because I love the lore behind her and what her skills stand for. I don’t want to see her turn into the same as all the other races; I don’t want to see her abilities turned into the same as what every shaman, paladin and druid can do. I don’t want her to be any more powerful than other healing classes – I used to want priests to be the best healers, but I’ve lost that opinion – but I do want her to be distinct from all the others. Blizzard removed a lot of the class quests because they saw them as not consistent with the current content – they don’t want people to have to work too hard in the old world, so that they’re there for too long and don’t get to see enough of their latest work. Their latest expansion is what they want people to be in, after all. But I don’t agree with the idea that these quests are too difficult. They are time-consuming quests, but they’re not impossible – I appreciate that there are less new players than there used to be, so the group parts can be tricky, but that’s beside the point. People roll alts, and if on those alts they had to do the quests, groups would be easy enough to find.

There were a few buffs that remained specific to class – Power Word: Fortitude, Blessing of Kings, Gift of the Wild – but Blizzard announced yesterday that they’re making buffs that are equal to those available via leatherworking and inscription. The justification is supposedly that it’s hard to make sure you have all those buffs available in a 10 man. Besides the fact that this misses the point – if you can’t guarantee a druid, how can you guarantee a leatherworker? – that’s simply not the case. How many ten man guilds consistently push new content which is made difficult without these buffs without one single priest, one single paladin or one single druid? I’m willing to bet not many, especially since paladins and druids can fulfil three roles in a raid.

I’ll play my priest even if they make her a carbon copy of every other character out there, because I love her and she’s the only character I’ve ever been able to log onto and feel excited about. But that doesn’t mean I like what Blizzard is doing. Bottom line for me is that MMO’s need some diversity to work – players need to feel like their character is special. Luckily, it looks like Blizzard may have recognised this, with the introduction of the Path of the Titans feature in Cataclysm – it seems they want players to be able to progress down the path they feel suits their character best. Could this be a compromise between the high class diversity of vanilla WoW and the homogeneity of Wrath of the Lich King? We’ll just have to wait and see.

~Farf

Just me, or a strangely phallic choice of memorial?

The Shrine of Dath’Remar is one of the quests you receive on Sunstrider Isle as a newbie blood elf; you get it at the same time as the quest I discussed yesterday, where you have to collect the quest-giver’s belongings. This is a different kind of quest, though, as is apparent from the flavour text when you accept his task:

Day after day I stand here, watching, waiting. I’ve been accused of dwelling too much on our past, while my eyes look to the horizon. But it is my firm belief that each visitor to this island should honor those who have sacrificed all so that they may continue to do so.

Dath’remar Sunstrider was our first king. He led us here from Kalimdor through the Maelstrom.

Seek out his shrine to the west and do not return to me until you have read the plaque upon it in his honor.

The shrine lies up a hill to the north-west of the island – you have to battle your way through hordes of hostile mobs (who for some reason look a lot like mouldy broccoli) to get there. To complete the objective, there’s a small plaque on the front of the monument, which, when you click it, says:

Here lies the shrine of Dath’remar, a fitting tribute to a noble elf. Let all who gaze on this monument remember his sacrifice against the Scourge and his dedication to the cause of our continued survival. All who prosper in Quel’thalas do so thanks to him.

Quest complete. This is your first introduction, really, to the lore behind the Sin’dorei as a race. Granted, it doesn’t give you much more than the fact that Dath’remar Sunstrider led the elves from somewhere called Kalimdor across something called The Maelstrom until they landed in Quel’thalas, but that’s the whole point – it leaves you asking where Kalimdor is, what The Maelstrom is, why they chose here, why they left in the first place. If you find this interesting, you’re then free to look at the official WoW website (which is what I did when I finished the quest) or just google ‘Sin’dorei’ or ‘Dath’remar’ and see what happens. When you do that, you realise what a complex world Blizzard has created, and just how big the story of Azeroth and her races is. To illustrate that to the uninitiated, what follows is a (very) brief history of the Sin’dorei as a race.

———————————————–

About ten thousand years ago, one of the three principle civilisations on Azeroth was that of the Night Elves.  These nocturnal elves were ruled by Queen Azshara, a fiercely beautiful and proud leader. Under her rule, Kaldorei society was divided into two castes – the Kaldorei, or working class, and the Quel’dorei, or Highborne. Azshara, Highborne herself, favoured the Quel’dorei, but was still held in awe by her Kal’dorei subjects, because of her beauty and famed wisdom. Azshara was not impressed by their love and respect, and famously disparaged the Kaldorei as lesser beings. All Night Elves, Kaldorei and Quel’Dorei alike, also revered the Well of Eternity, a well of magic tapped into and used by the society as a part of every-day life.

Encouraged by Azshara, the Highborne began to use the Well of Eternity more and more frequently. Azshara, together with her chief advisor, Xavius, finally decided to purify Azeroth and make it perfect, at least in her eyes, using the power of the Well. This attracted the attention of Sargeras, a huge Dark Titan, who had helped create Azeroth, but had been driven insane by the chaos and disorder he saw in the universe. Sargeras entranced Xavius and finally Azshara herself, tricking her into making a portal, through which he planned to enter the world. While the portal was being opened, his Burning Legion, an army of demons and other monstrosities, entered the world at the city of Zin’Azshari, the capital city of the Kal’dorei civilisation. After the capital had been decimated, the second largest cultural centre, Suramar, was next in line; thousands of Kaldorei were slaughtered, while Azshara and the Highborne Quel’dorei laughed.

Certain Kal’dorei mustered a resistance; amongst these were Tyrande Whisperwind (the leader of the Night Elves in WoW). Along with the Stormrage brothers, Malfurion and Illidan, and three heroes from a future timeline, Tyrande destroyed the portal as it was about to open, an event which caused the Well of Eternity to explode. This cataclysm caused 80% of the landmass of Azeroth to sink below the sea, and created the two continents of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, plus the Northrend landmass we know of today.

After the horrific events (which became known as the War of the Ancients) the Highborne Quel’dorei were exiled by the newly-formed Kaldorei society, which reviled arcane magic in all forms. As such, 7,300 years ago Dath’remar led his exiled people across the ocean, striking land at what later became known as the Tirisfal Glades. The elves settled here for a time; however after a while something below the land began to drive them mad, and they headed north by sea, until they reached what would become known as Quel’thalas. Here they evolved as a result of being completely severed from the Well of Eternity, losing their immortality, their skin becoming pale peach instead of purple and their waking cycle being reversed, as well as shrinking slightly.

6800 years ago the Quel’dorei built a new Well of magic, the Sunwell, in their new homeland, using a phial of water from the Well of Eternity given to them by Illidan, who had turned traitor. The Sunwell was neccessary to satiate their hunger for magic, and helped them to construct a large, elaborate city, where magic supported the buildings and defended their lands via elfgates and runestones. Their society continued in this way for four thousand years, until they came under attack from the Amani trolls whom they had displaced when founding their homeland. The Troll Wars took such a toll on their people that they allied with the nearby human kingdom of Arathor, receiving military aid in return for instructing 100 humans in magic, which had previously been unknown to them. A thousand years later, when the human kingdoms of Gilneas and Alterac discovered dwarves in Ironforge to the south, the high elves became allied with the dwarves through the humans; this alliance was one of the principle catalysts to the dwarven War of the Three Hammers.

Peace continued for just under 3000 years, until the Second War, when the Orcish Old Horde came through the Dark Portal from the Outland and attacked the human kingdoms. An alliance was proposed between the seven human kingdoms, the Wildhammer and Ironforge dwarves, and the high elves, who participated only reluctantly under the leadership of Anasterian Sunstrider until the Orcish campaign in the North burned down the edges of the forests of Quel’thalas, destroying a protective runestone and slaughtering many Quel’dorei. This enraged Anasterian and he participated fully from that point, and eventually the Alliance triumphed.

However, the Quel’dorei king blamed the poor leadership of the humans for the deaths of his people, an attitude rejected by King Terenas of Lordaeron as foolish, pointing out as he did that many more elves would have died had human lives not been given to save Quel’thalas. Nevertheless, from this point the Quel’dorei all but withdrew from the Alliance, causing fractures in Quel’dorei society – the House Windrunner being a good example. Lady Sylvanas Windrunner, Ranger General of Quel’thalas, supported Anasterian, but her two sisters, Vereesa and Alleria Windrunner, sided with the Alliance, and left Quel’thalas behind.

The Quel’dorei once more became reclusive for the next 15 years, until the Third War. Arthas Menethil, the son of King Terenas Menethil of Lordaeron, had been corrupted. In his desire to save his kingdom and people from a plague that was mysteriously killing them, he had allowed his mind to be clouded by rage, and the demon Mal’Ganis had taunted him and drawn him to the frozen continent of Northrend, where had been tempted into taking up the evil sword Frostmourne, which stole his soul and forced him to put on the crown of Nerz’hul, destroying his humanity and turning him into the undead Lich King. Granted huge power, he had returned to Lordaeron and murdered his father, and then proceeded, together with his undead army of Scourge (zombies and skeletons, mindless corpses of those he had killed and raised to fight in his service) to ravage Quel’thalas, murdering 90% of the Quel’dorei population, including Sylvanas Windrunner, whom he raised as a banshee to fight for him. The forests of the kingdom were decimated, with a huge swathe of death and destruction, known as the Dead Scar, being cut up the continent and finishing at Silvermoon City, the capital, which was half destroyed. The massacre was only stopped when Sylvanas, showing incredible strength, managed to overturn Arthas’ control of her mind and plot against him, finally stopping him with the aid of Varimathras, a Nazrethim (demon) overlord. Once Arthas was defeated Sylvanas was able to return to her body, but she left Quel’dorei society forever, taking up residence in the ruins of Lordaeron where she became queen of the Forsaken, the cadre of Scourge who had followed her in overthrowing their mind control.

Prince Kael’thas Sunstrider stepped into the breach. The Quel’dorei renamed themselves Sin’Dorei, or ‘children of the blood’ in Thalassian, and swore to avenge their fallen. However, the Sunwell, upon which all had been dependant, had been tainted during the siege and was no longer usable. The blood elves were unable to survive without their magic, and many became sick and died. Desperate, Kael’thas allied himself with the Naga, the remnants of Quel’dorei society led by Azshara, who had survived when she and her Quel’dorei sank under the sea and now existed as twisted aquatic creatures, crosses between elf and fish. When this alliance was discovered, the Sin’dorei were branded traitors, and Kael was imprisoned and almost killed in Dalaran city – he was rescued by Illidan, who took him to Outland and taught him how to siphon magical enemy from the Twisting Nether, a reality inbetween the fabric of Azerothian reality and the Elemental Plane, to which the Burning Legion had been banished. With this knowledge, the Sin’dorei were able to rebuild Silvermoon and Quel’thalas, which took the next two years – however, they altered physically, their eyes going from blue to green to reflect their addiction to Fel (or demonic) magic.

Many Blood Elves wished to rejoin Kael in the Outland, and were unable to rely on the Alliance to help them reach the Dark Portal and cross the ravaged continent once they arrived – they instead turned to the Orcish Horde, now free of their demonic corruption and living in Kalimdor, led by Thrall. Breaking their silence, the blood elves asked Sylvanas to vouch for them, and were accepted into the faction and welcomed also by the Tauren and Trolls. When the Dark Portal opened, many blood elves began to make their pilgrimage to join their Prince.

However, Kael’s actions began to seem more and more erratic, and slowly, secretly, they began to be questioned in Silvermoon. Meanwhile, in Shattrath a multicultural city in the Outland, rumours grew of a Sin’dorei army marching on the city. Preparations for war were made by the Aldor, a faction of Draenai at odds with Kael’thas, but A’dal, the Naaru (a being of pure Light and goodness) leader of the city, refused to allow anyone to attack. When the Sin’dorei arrived, led by a powerful magi named Voren’thal the Seer, they surprised everyone by throwing down their weapons and pledging alliegance to A’dal.  When Kael unexpectedly appeared to have taken up residence Tempest Keep, a satellite spaceship that belonged previously to the Draenai, and began pumping huge amounts of magic out of the Twisting Nether, the rumours grew. Voicing suspicion of the Prince publicly in Silvermoon was punished with execution, but rumour continued – and was proved right, when it was revealed that rather than supporting Illidan as he claimed, Kael had been in contact with the Burning Legion and had captured a Naaru, M’uru, and imprisoned it in the Sunwell, where it was being used to summon Kil’Jaeden, Sargeras’ right-hand demon. It was also, shockingly for Sin’dorei society, revealed that the new-found ability of blood elves to channel the Light so that they could become Paladins (or Blood Knights) was in reality feeding off the captured Naaru, which had been held under Silvermoon City before being moved to the Sunwell and corrupted so that the demonic portal could be opened.

The Sunwell had to be destroyed, and was, with the Sin’dorei helping even though they knew it would plunge them back into the depths of magical addiction without respite. Kil’Jaeden was turned back, with M’uru sacrificing himself in the process. However, the Prophet Velen, the leader of the Draenai, a race of exiled Eredar, a race of which he had been one of three rulers (the other two, Archimonde and Kil’Jaeden, were corrupted by Sargeras and became his lieutenants), had become a member of the Alliance when Tempest Keep, his ship, was attacked by Kael’s forces, causing  the escape section of the spaceship, The Exodar, to crash into Kalimdor. Velen was able to purify the Sunwell and did so despite Kael’s genocide against his people.

This was a year ago. Today, the Sin’dorei are in a state of disarray, and society is changing. They are now accepted members of the Horde, but retain more loyalty to Sylvanas than Thrall. It was revealed that M’uru knew of his fate, as did A’dal, and willingly accepted it; the leader of the Blood Knights, Lady Liadrin, has pledged loyalty to A’dal. The forests are recovering, although the land under the Dead Scar is completely desolate and incapable of supporting any life; the southern regions of the forests, known as the Charred Woods or Ghostlands, were burned and destroyed by the Elves themselves, to stop any further corruption, and the wildlife there is tainted by the Plague. Many blood elves have followed their Horde allies to Northrend, to take the fight to Arthas; these include the Sunreavers, a faction of Sin’dorei in Icecrown itself.

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All that is a brief summary of the lore of just one race. There are nine other races (currently, with two more to be added) in Warcraft, and innumerable other unplayable races (Titans, Old Gods, Naga, several Goblin factions, ogres, Murlocs, Pandaren, Dragon Aspects, elementals, many tribes of Troll, some kinds of dwarves, some kinds of gnomes are just a few) in existence, all of which also have lore of a similar depth and complexity behind them, as well as countless wars, disasters, captures, corruptions and triumphs concerning two or more races. As you can well imagine, that amount of history was something I’d only ever encountered in novels before this point. And that’s just up to the end of the Burning Crusade – every expansion furthers lore and extends the story.

I know I keep going on about Sonic, but really, it was the only gaming experience I had, and at every turn it was becoming clear that this was a kind of game on a totally different scale.

Okay, conclusion: lore is big. Why is that a part of my record of Farfalla in Azeroth? It’s not as if I was on an RP server, so none of this really mattered to my character. Well, that quest was my introduction to something that would become my favourite aspect of World of Warcraft – and it’s for that reason that I’m recording it here. It reminds me of a stage where I knew so much less about the game, and every new discovery was exciting. That happens again when an expansion comes out, but it never really matches being completely new to the game and entranced by the tiniest things. It also reminds me of the intricacy of the game – the smallest of things in WoW are related to much larger stories, and there’s detail everywhere. That was something that amazed me about the game when I began playing, and still does today, years later.

Incidentally, it was also my first introduction to what’s known as a ‘lorelol’, or in other words ‘Blizzard screwed up the lore here.’ Remember the inscription on the monument?

Here lies the shrine of Dath’remar, a fitting tribute to a noble elf. Let all who gaze on this monument remember his sacrifice against the Scourge and his dedication to the cause of our continued survival. All who prosper in Quel’thalas do so thanks to him.

Dath’remar fought the Scourge? Not unless that was one seriously long-lived Quel’dorei – he’d have had to have been about seven thousand years old. Quel’dorei live longer than humans, but nowhere near as long as that – they’re real pensioners when they’re two thousand. The age of Sin’dorei is less certain – some say the same as High Elves, others say Sin’dorei are old at 350. We see these mistakes through WoW a fair bit, either on purpose – where Blizzard changes the lore to fit something new they want to implement, as they did in the Burning Crusade with the introduction of the Draenai, who had been considered an evil race up to that point – or accidentally. Still, for lore that was considered secondary to the games, and which would be at least as big as Tolkein’s work when written down in one place, I don’t think they’re doing badly.

Wow, that’s a big old post today. Something much shorter tomorrow, promise.

~Farf

Or greetings, traveler! Dorky as that may perhaps be.

Welcome to my blog. Perhaps a little explanation is in order. I’m a fairly regular girl from the UK, but one thing that makes me stand out amongst my friends is my love of gaming. My friends don’t game, and they don’t understand why I do.  I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for two and a half years now, from the release of the Burning Crusade expansion. I made a character on my server the first day I picked up the game, a Sin’dorei priest named Farfalla, and since then I’ve barely put her down, going from utter newbie who couldn’t even make her character turn around and run, to a hardcore raider as a holy priest in the Sunwell pre-3.0, flirted with RP on another server, and then to a casual raider, first as shadow and then holy again, in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

I haven’t only become a (fairly) skilled priest during my time in this game. I’ve made some really good friends, friendships that endure outside of Azeroth, and had some really good times. I’ve laughed with friends in Vent, screamed until my throat was hoarse the first time we downed Illidan as a guild, endured the agonising 1% wipes on Kalecgos and Brutallus, banged my head against the wall until I survived in PvP, felt the strange, disorienting feeling of having guilds full of friends fall apart. I’ve farmed countless minipets and mounts, way before the Achievement system was implemented and even more obsessively after. I even met my boyfriend in Azeroth, and we’ve now been living together for a year. I’ve changed as a person, for the better,  in all kinds of ways, some of which would have happened anyway as I went from an adolescent to an adult, and some of which happened as a result of my experiences in WoW.

I’ve done some really stupid stuff too. I’ve got too deep into the game and messed up my university course because of it. I’ve been that emo dramaqueen girl that you all know on your server, the one who logs onto the game for attention. I’ve cared about what happens in-game to the extent that what happened outside of it became far less important, and hurt my family and friends in the process. All of these stupid things I’ve done have also helped me grow.

So what is the reason for this blog? Partly I’d like my friends and family to see what it is I enjoy about gaming. But another reason is that today, Blizzard announced their third expansion to the game. Titled World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, it’s going to change the game world as we know it, ripping apart the continents of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor and changing the face of Azeroth permanently. And while I’m giddily excited about this prospect, it also occured to me that the places where some of my best in-game memories were formed are going to disappear forever. I want to record those places and memories, before they disappear.

So, here we are. 80 levels to develop my character to full strength, so 80 posts to chronicle Farfalla’s journey in-game.

For the Horde! Anar’alah!

~Farfalla

Encore un soir de raid 25 avec trop peu de monde, à en souhaiter la fin des vacances. Heureusement, il a été possible de convaincre les membres présents de ma guilde de rester groupés et de s’associer avec quelques membres en pick-up afin d’aller visiter un raid 25 historique : le Plateau du Puit de Soleil.

Je sais que certains membres de la guilde préféreraient aller à Ulduar 10 plutôt que de “perdre leur temps” dans de vieux raids BC mais… comment dire… apprendre à jouer ensemble, c’est ce qui compte le plus, non ? Quand on voit notre performance sur Thaddius à Naxxramas il y a peu, je vois mal quelqu’un me dire le contraire. Personnellement j’ai rejoins cette guilde parce que j’avais envie de participer au développement d’un groupe de 25 personnes motivées à jouer ensemble quels que soient les résultats en jeu, pas pour participer à des raid10 élitistes, ça je connais déjà très bien merci.

Il faut avouer que le Plateau du Puit de Soleil n’est pas un raid franchement difficile à notre niveau une fois les stratégies connues (il y a pourtant eu plusieurs wipes) et je dois bien avouer aussi qu’on est loin, très loin de l’ambiance de raids comme Ulduar ou Naxxramas côté “épisme” (oui je sais ^^). Mais je suppose que c’est dû à l’aspect “elfe de sang” du look général qui, euh… n’encourage pas au buccolisme, n’est-ce pas ?

Bref, voici quelques images prises pendant le raid pour mémoire car je ne suis pas près d’y remettre les pieds…

To download a high-res PDF version of my portfolio, please click the link below (17 MB in size):

http://www.ecuad.ca/~jdeveaux/john_deveaux_portfolio.pdf

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Artist Statement

clean   [kleen] -er, -est, adverb,  -er, -est, verb –adjective
1. characterized by a fresh, wholesome quality: the clean smell of pine.
2. free from all writing or marking: a clean sheet of paper.
3. complete; unqualified: a clean break with tradition.
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sim·ple   [sim-puhl] -pler, -plest, noun –adjective
1. easy to understand, deal with, use, etc.: a simple matter; simple tools.
2. not elaborate or artificial: a simple style.
3. not ornate or luxurious: a simple gown.
+
ef·fec·tive   [i-fek-tiv] –adjective
1. producing the intended or expected result: effective steps toward peace.
2. creating a deep or vivid impression; striking: an effective photograph.
3. able to accomplish a purpose: an efficient secretary.
=
de·sign   [di-zahyn] –verb (used with object)
1. to plan the form and structure of: to design a new bridge.
2. the combination of details or features of a picture, building, etc.: the design on a bracelet.
3. to intend for a definite purpose: a scholarship designed for foreign students.

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World of Warcraft: The Burning Addiction
Research Project – ECUAD Creative Process 2007

For this project, I wanted to focus on what extent people would spend time from their real lives on their virtual ones. I then went to the Alcoholics Anonymous website and took their manifesto of questions that they ask potential addicts (ie: Have you ever missed school or work due to alcohol?) and then remixed the questions to ask my fellow Warcraft players (ie: Have you ever missed school or work due to Warcraft?) and was amazed at how honest their responses were.

Click the link below to download the full project PDF and explore the addictive qualities of video games in greater detail (1 MB in size):

http://www.ecuad.ca/~jdeveaux/addiction/addiction_print.pdf

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World of Warcraft: Haikus
Video Editing and Production – ECUAD Video Art 2009

This Video Art project required us to use found footage and splice it together within the theme of a haiku and I chose to focus again on World of Warcraft. Several different scenes from official game play trailers were used along with my own poem sequences in order to create its own unique storyline set to a haunting yet beautiful soundtrack.

I also received some additional publicity from a major World of Warcraft fan blog and as a result, have now had over 6,000 views on YouTube:

http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/05/12/wow-moviewatch-world-of-warcraft-haikus/

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Medal of Honor: European Assault
Poster Design – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

With creative control to choose our own subject matter, I decided to create this poster for the soon to be released add-on of the popular Medal of Honor video game using World War II imagery and incorporating pertinent graphics and typeface layouts, with the centerpiece being this iconic image of the D-Day landing.

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Emily Carr Foundation Exhibition
Poster Design – ECUAD Digital Basics 2008

In my Digital Basics course, our instructor challenged us to create our own poster design that would be submitted for that year’s Foundation Exhibition. The design that I chose focused on a clean and precise grid layout, with the typeface echoing this overall theme as well.

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Read Between the Lies
Poster Design – ECUAD Visual Communication 2008

With an overall political theme required for this project for my Visual Communications course, I decided to focus on the ongoing tragedy occurring in Iraq. I wanted my critique to be bold and biting, yet symbolic at the same time by using George W. Bush’s own words being contradicted by documented facts on the ground within the layout of the American flag.

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The Starlight Express
Poster Design – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

One of the first poster design projects that I worked on in the Design Essentials program at ECUAD and BCIT, I wanted the overall theme to reflect a bygone age in which the Royal Hudson train serviced passengers from Vancouver to Squamish. This was all tied in with the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics along with using Futura as the typeface.

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International Campaign to Ban Landmines
Layout Design – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

This layout design was created to reflect on the tragedy that landmines cause in third world countries by mirroring two family units. Where the Nuclear Family is shown with the requisite two parents and two children, the Landmine Family is shown with obvious limbs missing and the daughter being replaced by a tombstone due to a landmine explosion.

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Tribeca Film Festival
Layout Design – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

Utilizing still images from the films playing in that year’s festival, a double-sided handbook spread was made highlighting film screenings and appearances in a clean and elegant design.

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Phoenix Rising v1.0
3D Design – ECUAD Design One 2007

These sculptures were created for my Design One class as the project called for us to construct new and unique 3D sculptures by combining a singular object in a repetitive fashion so that the original object would get lost in the sum of the whole of the new piece. Version 1.0 is a freestanding structure and able to balance on the tips of plastic spoons.

Phoenix Rising v2.0
3D Design – ECUAD Design One 2007

Version 2.0 was created as an alternative and two interpretations that I have with this sculpture are that of a Phoenix Rising out of flames (hence the title of the pieces) or of a frame-by-frame rotation of a high board diver tucking in as he falls to the water below.

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OBSCENE
Flipbook – ECUAD Digital and Interactive Arts 2008

Wanting to play on my audience’s moral standards, this flipbook showcased a woman performing an otherwise overtly sexualized activity, yet because I enlarged and hyper pixilated the original video footage, the viewer is not able to immediately ascertain what they are viewing. On initial viewing, they may in fact realize what they are seeing, but due to their personal embarrassment, may not give in to such puerile thoughts.

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HDR Porteau Cove
HDR Photography – ECUAD Digital and Interactive Arts 2009

On a very windy and cold January afternoon, my girlfriend and I drove up to Whistler from Vancouver and stopped briefly at the Provincial Park in Porteau Cove where I wanted to capture the incredible whitecap waves and this beautiful island in the distance. I took my original shot into Photoshop and digitally manipulated it in order to create this much richer and vibrant image.

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Oppositions
Design Exploration – ECUAD Design One 2007

Playing around in Illustrator for one of my Design One projects in 2007, I became transfixed in creating artificial 3D perspective illustrations on a digital 2D plane that draws the viewer in to mesmerize and make them dizzy.

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Compression
Typography Exploration – ECUAD Visual Communication 2008

For this typography exploration, I decided on taking words at their literal meaning and creating abstract illustrations out of the words themselves. Compression being a thematically delicious word to utilize in such a fashion, the word is repeated and imploded without end into itself.

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Poster Girl
Illustrator Project – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

One of my first major digital illustrations, this image has always been a favorite of mine and its title harkens back to the process of origination by using the Posterize tool in Photoshop to create the initial blueprint and then cleaning it all up within Illustrator.

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ROLEX Submariner
Illustrator Project – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

Another of my digital illustrations, I spent over 20 hours on this perfecting every detail in order to match the precision of the original watch itself. Created entirely in Illustrator, this illustration could substitute for the original any day.

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Idris Salih Photography
Website Design, Identity, Logo 2005

One of my freelance web design clients back in 2005, I was originally hired to just design and produce his portfolio site, but after seeing the logo and identity that he had been using, I challenged myself to provide him with a new one which would reflect the high contrast and starkness that is representational of his b/w portraiture photography and he loved it.

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John Fortunato Photography
Website Design 2005

Another of my freelance web design clients from a few years back, his work reflected a lot of what my design philosophy entails as well: clean + simple + elegant = design. With that in mind, I decided to use a clean palette with a lot of white space and simple, yet intuitive navigation, in order to allow the photographs to stand out and have greater impact on the viewer.

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I made this video for my Video Art class at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC, Canada this spring and it is based on the online video game, World of Warcraft.

The project required us to use found footage and splice it together within the theme of a haiku and I chose to focus on Warcraft, using several different scenes from official gameplay trailers along with my own haiku sequences in order to create its own unique storyline.

Enjoy!
- FlashAddict

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http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=110645

http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/05/12/wow-moviewatch-world-of-warcraft-haikus/

So last night, one of my good friends Kawehi from the guild BarbaricHonor sends me a tell (as I’m queuing up for Wintergrasp) and asks if I would like to join her Sunwell raid group. Do I? Never having had the chance to run Sunwell back in the BC days, I jumped at the chance to at least try. I knew that I wasn’t geared to run it….but that’s never stopped me in the past. (Ony, MC, Gruul and Kara were all PUG raids I was nowhere near geared for )

So anyway, I’m summoned from Dalaran to Sunwell Plateau on ‘Daily Island’ and everyone is standing around talking and handing out vent info…which I don’t have access to because my poor guild is too broke to afford Ventrillo. We just use the ingame system for now until we have the money :p The tanks get assigned, and I still can’t decide whether I want Lysix to be tank or DPS….so I just resign to the DPS role till 74 when I will sort out my gear situation once and for all. The groups get shuffled so everyone has a tank and a healer in each group and everything is good to go and so we start.

I’d like to point out that at this point I am crapping myself. I’ve never run it and I always get really nervous on raids I’ve never run, especially big raids like Sunwell or MC. It goes pretty well and we’re down stuff fairly efficiantly. A couple of people die here and there, and we wipe on one of the protectors…which should have been a warning sign, but I’m stubborn so I ignore it.

Everything is going fairly well, I recieve two prizes (a Pyrestone and a epic lw pattern, which I later give to Kiser and Kopla respectfully. I never sell stuff I can give to my guildies)….and the raid group is getting along pretty well too, which is always nice because I hate being stuck in a raid PUG where you have half the group who are either being obnoxious or hateful towards each other (It’s a game people, lighten up! We’re here to have fun, not rip each others throats out!). Then we get to the first boss, and my first look at him automatically wants to send me screaming for the hills.

And we try to down him, but we have an epic wipe…and I’m one of the last standing. Whether that’s because I’m good at standing in a spot where the healers can get me or what, I have no clue…but it’s always the case while I have five lvl 80’s lying at my feet. It makes me feel pretty damn special So I get healed, I move back to the start position and then the damn dragon decides that fighting us is hard work….so it decides to take a nap…

As you can see by this point, I’m pretty frustrated by the raid and a guildie of mine- Kasiden asks me if I can see about finding some blue pearls for him for a quest. Being the nice person I am, I say of course and talk about other stuff with him…all the time keeping my eye on the raid chat to make sure I fully know what is happening. We try again, and wipe. And again, and wipe. By the 4th time, I am dead for the 3rd time…release and run back…to find the mobs have all respawned at the beginning- we’re totally screwed because half the party is still over by the dragon and the rest of us are back at the beginning. So we call the raid and I thank Kawehi a whole lot for the invite because I really appriciate her doing stuff like this for me.

After I hearth out to Dalaran, I meet up with Kiser who proceeds to help calm my frazzled nerves by calming me down and talking to me about various things. It was very nice because he turned down a Heroic with our guild leader to stay with me and talk. Half of our conversation was spent outside on the grass in Dalaran, staring up at the stars. I do so love this city, and to share it with my guildies is all the more fun

I’m back at college now, and things are going pretty well. WoW-wise, I’ve been carrying on as usual – downed all of Sunwell, so I got my Outland Raider achievement, which is nice.

More excitingly, my druid’s level 72 now! I’m gonna try to get him to 80 and raid as Balance. All my caster friends will love me. I’m currently working through Borean Tundra, something I didn’t do on my mage. I’m really enjoying it; the quests out here are a blast. Nice not to have to retread old content as I did while I was leveling him through Outland.

Vel finally finished exploring Northrend, so he’s got an epic tabard now, which is nice. I’ve pretty much geared him out as much as is actually possible; there’s maybe 4 or 5 pieces left in current raid content that I can use, most off Sapphiron or KT on heroic. Looking forward to benchmarking my DPS on Friday or Saturday against Patchwerk – I should be able to break 5k, maybe 6k. Until then, I’m gonna try and finish exploring Eastern Kingdoms.

With Wrath of the Lich King incoming in less than 2 days are you raiding?

The reality of raiding in the shadow of the expansion is a bit of an interesting idea from a conceptual point of view.  Do you raid for gear that will be used basically for leveling purposes only?  Do you raid to see the content before its completely “last expansion”?  Or do you just take a break, rest, relax, get prepared for Wrath or even go out and fish, cook, quest, pvp, dungeonmaster your way to more achievements while you have the “free” time?  My guild has been in Sunwell as of late, but officially called raiding activities last Wednesday.

In have been bored to tears.  I have ended up sitting around for hours a day, every day not knowing what to do with myself.  Do I have fun? Well yeah.  I enjoy sitting around talking with friends, doing the occasional dungeon and helping people do quests for their loremaster achievements, or just plain hang out in Arath Basin continually using more of my G.N.E.R.D.S. trying to get my protection paladin her Hallowed title weeks late.

That was until . . .

Pug Raiding …

A few people on our glorious server have been doing some latenight raiding lately.  More specifically, we call it “leftover raiding“.  Made up a number of people from the top guilds on the server on their alts and not a small population of people who, ummm… would not have been allowed into Hyjal or Black Temple 3 months ago let alone Sunwell Plateau.

A PuG in Sunwell?  Yes, I know it has been happening all over the world lately.  Our trek into the final raid instance of TBC has been rewarding.  While only a handfull of the raid members had even gotten past the first trash pull, we managed to defeat Kalecgos and Brutallus for the last two weeks running.  This week, we finally managed to defeat Felmyst this week.

Ledge Boss:

The worst boss in the game has to be the Ledge Boss.  I can honestly, only remember two other bosses in the game that cost me more money in repairs.  The Tears Boss cost me a pretty penny back in the day on the warrior.  Yes, you try to die in a fire consistently as the tank when people crater 30 times in a single night.  The second worst boss had to be Baron Geddon errr … Solarian.  A single most annoying encounter where people needed to actually do this thing called “pay attention and react”.

We managed to defeat the fabled Ledge of death a few nights ago.  I can honestly say that this was a well worth the pain, suffering, and murderous thoughts had about hunter pets (especially the annoying Core Hounds and Devilsaurs).

Mu’ru:

After about 4 hours with a Pug working on Mu’ru we managed to defeat him.  Now I realize this is not a feat of strength these days.  Its still quite a decent challenge.  Wipe after wipe will attest to that.  We managed to defeat Mu’ru with a warrior tank who was pretty much in ZA/Badge gear and 3 T6 Paladins.

As you can no doubt tell we did have some really geared people and then some people who are just arent geared at all.  A glaive rogue and some full tier six people combined with about 10-12 people in gear ranging from Karazahn, Frozen Shadowweave, to tier four gear managed to defeat Mu’ru the guild killer.  I can only imagine the realities of the fight pre 3.0 patch.  Even with a limited amount of gear we saw four Sentinels before the phase shift.

The biggest help though is 3 protection paladins all speccing into Divine Guardian.  Honestly, this is not something I would have ever though about speccing into.  It is fairly counter-intuitve to spec into an ability that changes your immunity bubble into something that actually damages you.  However, for an encounter where the raid damage is so high, being able to force 30% of that raid damage onto a single or a series of single targets in this case, makes all the difference.

Kil’jaeden:

We did not do much with KJ.  I am sure that we would be more than capable of killing him if we had the time.  We just do not have the luxury of time.  We managed to get him around ~75% on one of our two attempts though.  Darkness of a Thousand Souls is just a fun way to end the night.

It was wonderful to see him at least before the expansion.  I know that this will be a point of dissension amongst my own group of friends and guild-mates.  We really should have gotten there ourselves.  I will always some level of guilt and disappointment because we didn’t get there as a guild.  We had many excuses, under-recruitment, waning desire to play the game, and a few people’s untimely attacks of real life responsibilities.  Getting there with a few of my guild-mates tonight was a good feeling.  I just wish we could have done it together on our mains.

In the end, I had always thought I would see this content on my warrior.  As disappointing as it is that I was unable to experience the last two encounters in Sunwell on him, I am thoroughly thankful for the opportunity to see them at all.  We go back in tomorrow on the final real night of The Burning Crusade.  I may be able to bring the warrior, but I have doubts we will be able to get all the way to Mu’ru, let alone Kil’jaeden.

This post will be edited with screenshots!

Cloudy Day is finally a Sunwell guild. Trash was easy–the book for Hardened Khorium Bars dropped, I rolled a 96, but Nino rolled 100 =(

Kalecgos on the other hand was crazy. After two sloppy wipes, we downed him (also a sloppy attempt, compounded by me not having a mic and therefore not being able to call portals on me. Oh well); he dropped the LEET tanking sword as well as 3 non-mage bracer tokens. Regardless, the down was awesome, and the fight is certainly unique. Here’s a quick run-through for those who don’t know it:

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There’s Kalecgos sleeping. Awwww….

The whole raid needs to run in at once lest some people be locked out. Portals will spawn at various locations, groups associated with those locations need to click them to be transported into some kind of nether world where you have to kill a demon.

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Here’s a portal that will teleport you…

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…here. You have to kill the demon before you kill Kalecgos, which is hard because you have tanks cycling in and out of the portals (and therefore tanking the 2 mobs at different times), and you have less DPS on teh demon both because you have less bodies down there and because Kalecgos gives the raid cool buffs that allow you to do more DPS on him.

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Now that the demon’s dead, DPS Kalecgos. He’ll enrage, and he will hurt. I believe our successful attempt left no tanks standing.

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Collect your phat lewtz. ^_^

I also spent all my badges on epic gems, and auctioned those gems as well as half of my bank. I now have 38 free bag slots for the grind to 80, and made about 1500g yesterday. Well on my way to an epic flyer now!

(edit 9 months later) lol, forgot all teh screenshots. And this is an epically abbreviated strategy.

Well, we raided till AFTER midnight tonight, unfortunately only got Illidan to 10%. Still had fun–but for some reason we had issues with parasites this time despite having 3 mages. In my defense I would argue that it wasn’t my fault! I was FN+BW’ing every time it came up and there were Sahdowfiends nearby.

Even so, we ahd some good attempts, one-shotted most bosses, and then Galistul decided to be way too generous on Akama loot, and by doing so, allowed me to replace my Kara bracers! I’m now running with the bracers off Akama, meaning that I will probably go ahead and enchant them before WOTLK.

Speaking of WOTLK, who’s excited?! I know I am! Planning to keep my fire spec for leveling, just cause I’m so used to it at this point. I do plan to roll through 71-80 very quickly as I have a lot of free time to grind on my hands, and plan to take full advantage of it.

One thing I do hope to do before WOTLK comes out is take a look at Sunwell, hopefully tomorrow after we down Illidan. It looks fun (but difficult!) and I wouldn’t mind some of the gear from there.

I’ve been working on my Fishing lately–picked up about 6 different fishing Achievements as well as getting my skill up to about 230. =) I want to have my skill Outlands-ready by the time the expansion hits.

First of all, apologies for the lack of updates recently, I blame Blizzard for giving us the Achievement system in the last patch.  Like the true obsessive-compulsive I am, I’ve been farming those achievements like a thing possessed.  One achievement in particular I never thought I’d see this side of level 80, but I did in fact gain it just before the last server reset.  Outland Raider.

Yes that’s right, I completed the achievement that meant I’d completed all Outland raid content, which is a roundabout way of saying:

WE KILLED KIL’JAEDEN BABY!  YEAH!

Let’s just bask in the glory of the screenshot for a minute.

Okay, okay, he’s been nerfed.  Yes we live in an age where we clear Kara in an hour and PuGs run Black Temple.  I don’t care.  He’s dead, we’re not.  Har Har Har!

Last week was the first time I got past Felmyst in Sunwell, and having seen the remaining bossfights, I have to admit I can’t quite see why all the hardcore raiding guilds rave about how well designed Sunwell is.  Let’s look at them all one by one.

Kalecgos
This guy can still be moderately tricky even after the patch, as it’s not about dps and all about co-ordination and not standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Post-patch the major problem that raids will face with the Kalecgos fight is NOT killing him.  Since he has to die at the same time as Sathrovar the Corruptor and they both exist in different dimensions, communication is the key.  Still, it’s a fun fight and I have to admit, quite well designed, despite some annoying “issues” like the portal spawn times that can make an already tricky fight frustrating.  The importance of smart decursing isn’t nearly as paramount, since they both die too quickly now for the Curses to mount up to anything significant.

Brutallus
Pre-patch, Brutallus was a brick wall for raids who hadn’t been farming Black Temple for months.  He’s your typical dps check, and without all the shiny BT gear, your raid most likely would have to min/max group composition to scratch out every last bit of dps before they hit his enrage timer, as we had to do.  And it’s here that my major gripe with the whole Sunwell boss fight design emerges.  Each fight practically required a new raid group to succeed.  Kalecgos required 4 decursers, Brutallus required the best dps you could field (cya mages, thanks for turning up), Felmyst required at least three priests, etc, etc…  Thankfully, post-patch you no longer have to min/max groups and can take whoever are the best players rather than who works best in a particular group because of what class they are, because buffs and synergies are now mostly raid-wide.  Result?  Brutallus dead in 3 minutes 11 seconds.

Felmyst
Ah, Felmyst.  I hated Felmyst for two reasons.  Firstly, we never managed to get past her pre-patch.  Secondly, I always had to switch to Aluriel and respec shadow for Felmyst, because of the boss encounter’s design requiring smart Mass Dispelling and our lack of sufficient numbers of Priests.  All of which was frustrating because Felmyst drops a staff that Calli badly wanted and we never managed to kill her anyway.  Felmyst is incredibly annoying due to a number of reasons, but the most annoying has to be the Deep Breaths.  This isn’t like Onyxia’s Deep Breath, which is survivable, oh no.  If you get caught in Felmyst’s Deep breath you get Mind Controlled and your raid has to kill you.  End. Of.  Story.  What makes it even more annoying is that she can breathe in any one of three locations and the warning of where she’s going to breathe looks almost the same for all three locations.  Oh yes, Felmyst is FUN!  Not.  She will most likely be the new brick wall in Sunwell even after the patch for the simple reason of Deep Breath prediction.  You cannot zerg Felmyst they way you can Brutallus, you must be paying attention at ALL times and know exactly what to do.  All the time.  Of course, not being able to zerg her is not a Bad Thing, it’s good that even after the nerf patch there are still raid bosses that can hand you your own arse on a plate if you take them for granted.

Eredar Twins
If you make it this far, congratulations.  Now take a look at your raid and identify anyone who has any lag or latency issues.  Once you’ve identified them, remove them from your raid.  Seriously.  Blizzard designed an entire fight around killing anyone who lags even slightly, and worse, having them take the rest of the raid with them.  If you get targeted with Conflagration, GET THE F**K AWAY FROM THE RAID!  If you don’t, you wipe.  If you lag, you wipe.  If you have any latency at all, you wipe.  If you finish your current spellcast, you wipe.  And just to add insult to injury, you can also be stunned at any time, including just before you get a Conflagrate, and wipe.  Apart from that one small issue, it’s a pretty good fight, and any raid that can down Felmyst should have the co-ordination and dps to kill them.  And they drop phat lewt.  Oh yes, these are the first of the bosses that drop the Tier 6+ gear, and very pretty it is too.

M’uru
I now totally understand why pre-patch M’uru was considered a brick wall learning curve.  The good news is that now, he isn’t.  You will need at least two players who can either purge or dispel, or your raid will wipe, of course.  Thankfully this isn’t such a stringent pass/fail requirement as earlier bosses had, but the boss himself used to be so tough that raid composition was the least of your worries.  He is now by no means a pushover, but any raid who downed Brutallus or Felmyst pre-patch should have what it takes to put him on his arse post-patch, and do it on their first night of trying him.  The biggest challenge is dealing with the hordes of adds he spawns, and not just killing them, but killing them in a smart way so as to mitigate the danger to the raid when M’uru dies and Entropius spawns.  Again, it requires a smart raid, not a mindless zerg, but if you got this far, you can do it.  And the loot will last you until level 80, which is always a nice incentive.

Kil’jaeden
The Big Man himself.  Take the complexity of all the previous Sunwell boss fights, add the importance of not standing in fire (because it’s hot!), remove the “you must have x number of y class” bullshit that went with earlier bosses, add some “LOOK MA, I’M A DRAGON!” rofls and you have the Kil’jaeden fight.  Much like M’uru, you absolutely definitely cannot just waltz in here and zerg it, and your raid leader will spend hours banging his face into his keyboard in frustration because idiots are not staying away from people with Fire Bloom/running into other people when they have Fire Bloom/failing to get into the Shield of the Blue in time/not moving away from Armageddon in time (because it’s HOT!) etc, etc…  But each failed attempt will teach you something new and you will improve.  With luck, your raid will have enough dps after the patch (as we did) to zerg him to some extent by getting him to 55% fast enough to miss the second Darkness, which helps immensely, but no matter how you do it, killing Kil’jaeden is still a hell of an accomplishment. The fight is utter chaos and I have nothing but respect for any guild that downed him before the patch.  But killing him after the patch is no mean feat either.  If you can do it, and if you can even get to him you’ve got the raid who can do it, well done!  You completed World of Warcraft!  Now go grind Sporegarr rep or something, Rash of the Itch King is only three working days away!

I’m a healy priest. I’m collecting haste because its awesome and I need to lvl to 80 in two weeks, right? Thats one of the best weapons in the game right now, WHY WOULD I PASS?! Sunwell loot? C’MON!!

Apparently I’m a dickehad because I won this and spent my own dkp on it, and the shadow priest didn’t get it. Hello! Spell haste helps healers too!! AND that mace ALONE has more +spell power than my staff. Double that with an offhand and It’s ORGASMIC!

So I got a few whispers from said SPriests friends basically calling me a jerk. One person said “That’s fucked that rolled on that!” Yet he rolled too! I was just the person to bid DKP and win it.

See our loot rules are whack lately because we bring a few pug people in from guilds that stopped raiding to fill up our raids when members can’t make it. So it’s everyone roll. If no non-guild people roll, a guildie can bid DKP, and then the bidding starts. I won fair and square.

He can eat a bag of dicks. Mages use spirit now, they want old priest only gear now. I’m fine with that. if they have the DKP, sure take it.
I’m just stoked about my mace. I went full disc too. XD I can get my flash heal to .72 seconds.

Seriously I am sooooo tired of Black Temple. We’ve down two bosses in Sunwell in one effort. Yeah, they’re nerfed now, but hey we’ve got the gear. So whatever. Not like some kara nub group is going to come in and do the same.

The guild is pushing for more content cleared. That’s lovely, but why didn’t you push this hard for the past 3 months. You knew WOTLK was coming!

So we have two weeks and they want to push to Kil’jaden. x.x We can probably do it because we’re two-shot learning the bosses, but c’mon I’m tired of this shit. Its gear I will replace at 76-ish. Which hopefully will only take me two weeks to get to. Why am I working my ass off for this shit to have some douchebag spriest outbid me?

Twats.

30%…

30%!!!!!!!!

Ja… 30% wurden die Bosse generft. Ihre HP wurde somit drastisch heruntergesetzt und viele hauen auch weniger zu.
Und was ist nun? Die Bosse sind teilweise so ein Witz geworden… Sunwell wurde zu Lolwell!

Kalecgos fällt um bevor die Rotation mit den Portalen überhaupt richtig angefangen hat.
Brutallus… rofl… er war einmal der Gearcheck schlechthin! Jetzt ist er Freeloot!

Nun, gestern hatten wir gleich 2 Firstkills. Nach ein wenig Taktik üben am Sonntag ist Felmyst gestern im 1. Try gefallen.
Genauso haben wir dann ein paar Wipes lang die Taktik für die Eredar Twins in unsere Köpfe gehauen, und auch diese sind umgefallen.

Und Heute wird wohl oder übel M’uru folgen wenn wir die Taktik genau so schnell reinkriegen.

10% HP Nerf hätten es bei weitem getan. Nein, es wäre verdammt nochmal kein Nerf nötig gewesen! Man hat eine höhere RaidDPS und somit wäre sogar eher noch ein Buff nötig gewesen!

Das einzig Anspruchsvolle ist noch die Taktik. Da diese aber nun über eine viel kürzere Zeit aufrecht erhalten werden muss ist es auch weniger Fehleranfällig und es wird einfach viel leichter. Ich finde es traurig… wozu Blizzard? WOZU?

Damit man jetzt von den Casuals noch lesen kann “lf24m Sunwell Random /w me”???? Sorry, aber Sunwell war für die Raidelite gedacht, und nun kann man da wohl auch mit T4 durchrennen. Es wäre auch ohne den Nerf für viel mehr Leute zugänglich gewesen, aber jetzt mit dem Nerf ist es kaum mehr als ein Items abgreifen… bzw. aus Blizzard Sicht ein Items an Casuals verteilen damit weniger mimimi kommt…

Ich hätte die Eredar Twins verdammt gerne vor dem Nerf erlebt. Das Tanken dort ist das geilste das es gibt für nen Hexer Alle anderen Hexertankbosse sind langweilig im quadrat, keine wirklich spielerische Herausforderung. Aber durch die ständige Bewegung beim Tanken ist es bei den Twins mal was richtig schönes, und vorallem nicht etwas langweiliges. Schade Würde die beiden echt gerne im Pre-Nerf Zustand erleben.

*seufz* Blizzard, ihr seid mit diesem 30% Nerf WEIT übers Ziel hinausgeschossen! Viel viel viel zu weit

LG
Flausch

  Prior to having a brand new cash dump (I’m looking at you, Inscription!), I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately. Outside of levelling the Pally, there just isn’t much to do. Nobody can gather the numbers for a 25 man these days (maybe now, after the patch), and even a 10-man is frequently proving fruitless, as evidenced by a failed Saturday Kara attempt… made even sadder by the fact that we had 2 top-notch tanks ready to go, and 2 very good healers, plus an outstanding Warlock. All of the required parts, just needing 5 DPS of whatever stripe – and we couldn’t get ‘em.

  So, I turned my wandering eye towards what I *could* still do for gear upgrades. Having already coughed up the dough to get a set of the Black Temple level Healing mail bracers crafted for Manchego, I decided that I wanted to get the Sunwell gloves. The reagents for this alone are daunting. 30 Heavy Knothide Leather, 16 Nether Dragon Scales and 18 Primal Lifes are the easy part. 8 Primal Mights, those were easier for me than most as I have Ribby as a Transmute-specced Alchemist and my wife’s Shaman, Nessiness, is also Transmute specced. That left 6 Sunmotes.

  Skywall isn’t exactly known for deep progression Guilds. Proudmoore, we ain’t. Still, there are a few, Horde-side that have been there and I knew that Guild Banks were being cleared in order to make space for the expansion. After a little bit of digging, and a lot of patience, I was able to contact to the right people from <Noobdock Saints> about Sunmotes, and acquire enough for the gloves. The Ring is going to have to wait, but I’ll get it too in time. For the gloves alone though – 750g per mote, 4500 in total. I realize that it’s a pretty sizable amount, but I was able to farm that in the week prior, just playing a few hours at night and in the morning before work. Having lots of crafting at my fingertips to turn regular items into more valuable items pays off here. Anyhow, by Friday I had gathered everything that I needed, but overlooked one detail.

  I did not think my cunning plan all of the way through.

  Due to the limited Sunwell penetration within our server and faction, nobody had the recipe. I had always just assumed that someone, somewhere had dropped it, but I assumed wrong. Now, I was sitting around with over 5500g of mats, and I couldn’t auction the Sunmotes as it would look *terrible* for me to have begged them off someone with the promise of personal use, only to turn around and pawn them for profit. Thus, I had to do the unthinkable. I rolled an Alliance toon.

  Since I know Ironforge to be the Ally’s version of Orgrimmar, I elected to roll accordingly. Gnome Rogue, quick and dirty. Named her “Squizzle” because it just seemed to fit, replete with annoying purple ponytails. Stab – stab -stab to level 6 and I ran my little butt into IF. Now was the hard part. Wowjutsu listed the top three Ally guilds on the server as <Driven to Conquer>, <Disconnected> and <Aenima>. (*editor’s note, I know that the AE runs together, I don’t know enough to write that character) Anyhow, some digging and pinging turned up a crafter – in <Sacred Samophlange>. Predictably, the player wasn’t online. So I commenced smuggling.

  A quick inquiry in Guild chat for someone with an Alliance toon produced someone who not only had one, but would do both ends of the smuggling for me. As I was certainly nervous at the prospect of slipping over 5500g in materials through an AH for mere pennies, that anyone could buy up. What if it didn’t come through, that some lucky stiff hit “search” at just the right time and nabbed it all? Legitimate deal, no recourse. Nails were bitten.

  Thankfully, it all made it through – right about the time that I was able to locate my crafter, and so – to Perico, Champion of the Naaru, of <Sacred Samophlange> – thank you! I was the proud owner of a pair of Sun-Drenched Scale Gloves, the first (and only!) pair on Skywall’s Horde side. A few minutes of reverse smuggling later, they actually made it to the Horde side, too!

  This was one piece of gear that I definitely hesitated over the “Equipping this item will bind it to you” window on. What are they worth? 9000g? 12,000? Who in their right mind would even pay what I paid? I wound up equipping them anyhow, after burning 30 of Ribby’s Badges for gems, and sending them to Noobz to ‘chant em up. 6 % Haste now for Shammy healing, and (post patch), Spellpower is at something like 1060… roughly +2000 heals, pre-patch, I think. Whee!

  Now, I just need to farm up the mats for that Ring and do it all over again…

Was zum Donnerwetter war bei ultio gestern nur los, vorallem wenn man dann den Mittwoch auch noch hinzuzieht.

Mittwoch, Schwarzer Tempel, 0 Wipes, 3 1/2 Stunden bis clear. Unser neuer Rekord, Mördertempo, alle konzentriert, und bis auf etwas Probleme bei Bloodboil (bei 80% ein Tank tot) alles super.
Da denkt man sich doch, heiiii, super Start in die Raidwoche. So darf es ruhig weitergehen. Vorallem nachdem wir die letzten 2 Wochen mehrere Raidausfälle hatten.
Ok, ein Kritikpunkt… Illidan will und will uns einfach kein Legendary geben. Auch der Felhunter on a stick bleibt verschollen.

Donnerstag, 19:30, Sunwell Plateau… der Weg richtung Kalecgos wird, mal wieder ohne wirklich brauchbaren Randomdrop, geebnet (Wieso haben wir so ein scheiss Droppech?).
Naja, voller Elan kommen wir bei Kalecgos an… und was ist? Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe, Wipe… Kill…. Ja, 13 Wipes.
Ok, ich war nur ca. die hälfte der Trys dabei. Da ich von Kalecgos nichts mehr brauche habe ich irgendwann gegen noch einen Heiler gewechselt, damit es vielleicht etwas besser läuft.

Danach erstma gute 30min gewartet. Leute austauschen, einer der noch kurz weg musste etc. 22:30, weiter richtung Brutallus. Natürlich wieder kein Randomdrop bei der Trashgruppe.
Wipe… Kill… WTF?
Beim ersten Try fällt bei ca. 50% ein Tank um, passiert. Aber die Feuereles waren dann halt schon verbraten. 2. Try, keine Feuereles, 20 Sekunden vorm Enrage geht der dicke Grubenlord down O_O. Unser erster Kill vor Enrage, und dann erst noch 20 Sekunden vorher?! Und das erst noch nach so nem nervigen Kalecgos-megagegimpe?! Der eigentlich schwierigere Encounter fällt viel schneller als der Leichtere.
31k Raiddps… vorher waren wir immer knapp auf den benötigten 28k, wenn nicht sogar darunter.

Was zum Teufel ist denn los bei uns?
Hat unser Raidleader allen sexuelle Abenteuer versprochen wenn es nun wieder besser läuft (und ich hab nichts mitbekommen weil ich am Bejeweled zocken war in der Wartezeit????)?
Oder wollte Xion seine Astlochkünste vorführen und alle wollten einfach nur weg um das nicht ansehen zu müssen?

Man wird es wohl nie erfahren, aber Theorien sind erwünscht

LG
Flausch

.:Swedish:.

Det dröjer inte länge fören Lich King stormar affärerna, och har du ännu inte besegrat raid bossarna kommer din sista chans i nästa patch! Alla raid bossar kommer att få 30% mindre hp och kommer att skada mindre i nästa patch! Detta gäller alla raids från Karazhan till Sunwell! Besegra Illidan nu när han är svag!

.:English:.

I won’t be long until Lich King enters the store’s, and if you yet havn’t defeated the raid bosses, you will have a last chance in the upcoming patch. All raid bosses will have their health reduced by 30%! And they will do less damage, as well. This will affect every raid from Karazhan to Sunwell! Slay Illidan now, while he’s weak!

There is a never ending debate about Elemental vs Enhancement for leveling. I have tried both specs and if you want to level easy and painless go for an elemental spec. Concerning speed there is no real difference and also killing elites is similarly easy.

The main advantage of an elemental spec are the much better ae-capabilities and even better self-heal options. Also you are not as gear dependent as an enhancer.

I have rl-connections to several enhancement shamans raiding Sunwell Plateau. I will use these connections to bring you some enhancement leveling specs for WOTLK.
Update: I could manage to create a really nice looking specc for Enhancers. Click here!
Update 2: Finally updated both speccs to match the patch 3.1 changes of all trees and added “mandatory glyps” to ease with the selection.

Update 3: In addition I’ve finally updated the talent build to reflect Patch 3.2 and added even more Glyphs.

Elemental Leveling Spec WOTLK 1
Advantages: Very high crit rate, single target dps, excellent ae capabilities, maxed group buffs and mana regeneration
Disadvantages: If your gear is too far behind you will probably run out of mana while healing yourself.
Your Gear: Karazhan or better equipped and wearing a shield plus a lot of mail
PvP suitable: 1/5
PvE grouped: 5/5
Summary: If you have decent gear and maybe want to run several instances while leveling or you’re grouped with spell-casting friends most of the time use this spec.

THE ALTERNATE ELE LEVELING SPECC HAS BEEN REMOVED BECAUSE THE ONE STATED ABOVE HAS PROOFEN CLEARLY BETTER.

See also the links on the bottom right of my blog and the most recent WOTLK Talent Calculators.

That’s it for now. More specs for leveling purposes will be added soon. In the future there will be posts for professional level 80 raiding specs for all three trees.
Have fun leveling!

Komischer Titel für den ersten Blog-Eintrag aber irgendwie passt er. Nur kurz zur Erläuterung: Wir haben die beiden „alten“ T6 Instanzen durch, Archimonde zum sechsten Mal gekillt und Illidan diese ID zum dritten Mal. Der Vorbereitungspatch auf das Addon kommt auch und damit ein Haufen Änderungen wo wir noch nicht wissen ob das nun vorteilhaft für uns ist oder nicht. Meine Frage dazu: geht noch was?

Hyjal und den Tempel abfarmen oder doch lieber noch zumindest bis zum Patch den Sonnenbrunnen besuchen? Dazu gibt es bei uns leider geteilte Meinungen. Klar hat nicht jeder schon alle T6-Teile geschweige denn überhaupt den 4er Bonus, also ist unser Equipment noch nicht so Sonnenbrunnen tauglich wie es laut diversen Guides sein sollte. Andererseits was bringt top Equipment, wenn immer wieder Konzentrationsfehler passieren? Manche Fehler kann man mit Ausrüstung vielleicht noch „abschwächen“ aber wer z.B. bei Archimonde regelmäßig im Feuer verreckt dem hilft auch T6 nicht. Man könnte natürlich sagen wir tauschen diese „Schwachstellen“ aus, aber da hast du schon das nächste Problem: woher nehmen? Tirion ähnelt sehr einem „Family and Friends Server“. Es gibt einen Haufen kleine Gilden und nur eine Hand voll Raider die wirklich bereit sind mind. 4 Tage die Woche 110% Leistung zu bringen und diese sind auch auf die derzeitigen Top 10 Gilden verteilt. Einige davon sind natürlich bei uns und regelmäßig dabei aber nun ist offensichtlich die Motivation flöten gegangen. Wir haben zum Beispiel NIE länger als 2 IDs gebraucht einen neuen Boss zu legen, einmal ernsthaft getryed waren immer schnell Erfolge sichtbar, jetzt haben manche keinen Bock mehr weil in 2 Monaten die Items nichts mehr wert sind. Warum daher jetzt noch anstrengen? Sunwell kann ich mit 80 auch noch gehen wurde zu meinem Lieblingsspruch in den letzten Tagen…. Ich verstehe es nicht, ganz ehrlich. Sonntag waren wir dann trotzdem im Sonnenbrunnen da wir den Tempel an zwei Tagen clearen konnten und somit ein Raidtag übrig geblieben ist. Kalecgos im 3. (!) ernsthaften Try auf unter 20% innen und außen geprügelt und es gibt Leute die da kein Blut lecken… Wozu spielen die dann dieses Spiel? Die fehlende Motivation ist sicher auch auf das derzeitige Klima im Raid zurückzuführen. Von Geschrei bis Beleidigungen haben wir derzeit im TS alles was man braucht und das kostet auch Nerven.

Das Release-Datum steht und der Patch kommt auch in 2-3 Wochen, eigentlich ist TBC somit schon so gut wie vorbei. Ich habe vor TBC leider schon fast alle Raid-Instanzen versäumt und nun passiert mir dies mit dem Sonnenbrunnen wieder, nicht nur für mich schade.

Wow, just wow. It took us the best part of a couple of months of effort – with interruptions due to the vacation season and an usual issue of attendance of our core raiders – in order to finally kill Brutallus. The mechanics of the encounter itself are not that difficult, but it is unbelievably hard to execute perfectly. With just 6 minutes to go through Brut’s 10M health points, there is no margin for error. We had brought him down to 2% a few times, then 1%, always missing 10 seconds of full raid dps to finish him. Finally, at the very last attempt of last night’s raid, we did it. He died a few seconds after the enrage timer kicked in. Onto Felmyst now…

In case you want to congratulate us, here is the link to the post in our forums  .

The usual guild first photo op after a well deserved kill