Enjoy.

Hi all!

I made a new page to list (and link) all of the minor glyphs that I have so far discovered. If you’d like me to make one, just whisper or send me an in game mail. I have tons of mats for everything right now.

A couple things to say tonight: New Kara boss, and AV glory.

New Karazhan Boss

While the Halloween event is happening, the Lich King sent a wave of scourge through Azeroth in the form of Zombies. Part of this event was a new boss added to the servant’s quarters above Attunmen in Karazahn. We cleared Kara a few days ago, but luckily Blizz did the Smart Thing ® and spawned the boss despite how you were saved to the instance. We mustered up a group, picked up Alidar (our favorite pickup tank mind you, he’s very good, doesn’t mess around and is very fun to play with) and headed in. The fight was pretty typical, except that it had the advantage of being unknown to most of us (some people had read a bit about it before going in, but we don’t count that :P). It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time in a raid environment (although the other week’s 4/6 run in ZA where we downed the fire boss with less than a minute on the timer and only a couple standing was pretty intense). We had to wipe a few times and experience the fight before we licked it. Once we got it, it was cake. I’m confident next week we’ll go in there and one-shot the bastard.

It’s somewhat of a bummer that he only drops an ax and a pet. Where’s the magic-user’s gimmick Blizz? However, this made it totally worth it:

Yup, that’s Nightshara, a resident hunter, using the ax. Apparently her kids got a total kick out of it and she stood around playing it in Shattrath for a while I believe. I’m glad she got it and that her kids enjoyed it so much! I’m sure no one enjoyed it more than she did with her family

Alterac Valley

I was in BGs earlier this evening, just grinding away hours until Wrath comes out- we had done the Headless Horseman summons 9 times already, and both of my trick-or-treats turned me into a bat and a skelleton. I entered AV because it’s the quickest honor grind, and let’s be honost, I don’t really play BGs for fun or the PVP aspect of it (getting trained isn’t my thing). Anyway, after 39 minutes, check out the score:

Click the image to see my entire screen shot. As a side note. I got the achievement for Everything Counts, and surely without those mines, we would have lost. The match started typically enough, everyone rushing Galv, then everyone rushing RH. We ended up in something like a double turtle. There was a complete stalemate at both the northern Alliance Bridge, and the the southern Horde…. hill thing between the towers. I distinctly remember the resources being 452 and 461 (Horde) when the turtle started. After I capped the tower next to Galv, I checked Tower Point, and continued south. When I got to Frost Wolf Graveyard, someone had capped it and I groaned to myself.

Turns out, it’s a good thing they did. I didn’t get much into that fenced in area and saw the fighting. The Alliance forces had been stopped dead in their tracks on that hill between the towers. I kept running around the tower and capping it (note my 3 caps), but then getting eaten by a Paladin and a feral Druid (surprise). I ran them around a good bit seeing as how I don’t have to kill them, I just have to keep them from undoing my tower cap. Anyway, we lost ground back to the gated area near the FWGY node, then we pushed back to the hill, then fell back again, and pushed to the hill again. Around 200, someone called out that this was a battle of attrition and that it wouldn’t be won with tower caps and such, so everyone should play it safe, don’t pursue, and don’t be an idiot trying to get HKs. Amazingly it worked. We deliberately didn’t push past the fence area after that and we ended up wearing them down.

Another side-note: I just re-spec’d deep destruction for PVP. It’s not the wisest choice, but I managed fairly well. In the screen shot you can see my bars are still visible and I still have my frames set up for raiding (don’t ask why recount was up, I didn’t even notice it), but once I get more comfortable in this pvp-destro skin I’ll be back to my streamlined UI and using my fingers a lot more.

P.S. - Tiburon, I want to know what it’s like with your uber-demo-spec. Sukiko says you rock hard in Arenas.

We did Kara tonight again. Run is down to 1 hour 37 minutes. I think this is the best time for us, we were moving very quickly, but any faster and it would have felt like work or an exam or something. I’m pretty happy with it, even if post-patch.

This is funny even if you don’t like Obama.

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

My first post.  Woot.  I love to read the tabloids/forums, I am not sure why, kinda like a train wreck most of the time.  But a while ago I found one of the funniest posts I have seen in a while.  We might not all agree on it, but it is funny IMO. I’ll put one of the best parts on as a teaser and the link if you want to read the rest.   The post isn’t long, but too long for here I think.

What if the UFC was like the WOW Arena . . .
Bob: “And here comes The Iceman himself, stepping into the cage. He looks ready for a fight.”
Jon: “Now his opponent steps in, Mr. Quinton “Rampage” Jackson himself, and . . . wait, is . . . is he holding a crowbar?”
Bob: “You got that right, Jon. Looks like his weapon of choice for this match is the crowbar. I think it’s fair to say we are gonna see some bloodshed tonight.”
Jon: “Uh, did I miss something? Why does he get to use a crowbar?”
Bob: “He won the last fight, Jon.”
Jon: ” . . . and?”
Bob: “And the winner gets rewarded with a upgraded gear. Rampage obviously choose the crowbar . . . not a bad decision if you ask me.”

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=7116542000&sid=1&pageNo=1

So it’s our first run after the patch. We cleared Karazhan in 1 hour 54 minutes with several disconnects and other net issues. Previous record was a hair over 4 hours. The chess event took the longest because it was bugged.

I bet we can do a 1 hour clear.

So I’m sitting here waiting for the realms to come back up, and I thought I would write a little post about what we should expect with this patch, and with Wrath.

Patch 3.0 (as of today)

Calender - I have really missed the calender these last few weeks that it’s been broken. Well now you can uninstall it, we will be using the in-game calender
Achievements - I’m not sure how many people are super excited about the achievement system (although I’m fairly apathetic about it, that doesn’t mean I won’t try for a few of em), but we should definitely arrange some days to work on some of them together.
Raiding - Whether or not we continue with raiding just depends on everyone. If on Thursdays we still have 10 people on that are ready to go at the usual raiding time, we will.
*Kara - Unless a lot of people drop out of raiding for the next few weeks, we can continue Kara as usual.
*ZA - We have taken a bit of a hiatus on ZA, but I do want to keep trying before Wrath. If everyone brings their A game, it doesn’t stand a chance.
Hallow’s End - I want to kill this as much as possible. I remember when it was going on last year and we couldn’t go because we didn’t have any 70s yet; it makes me so much more excited for it this year. I’m not really counting on that Sinister Squashling, but the “the Hallowed” title would be so bad ass.

Keep an eye on the new in-game calender (YYAAAAAAAAYYYY) for the schedule.

Wrath (Nov 14th and beyond)

Leveling - Most of the guild has expressed that they do not want to bumrush it to 80. Wrath is supposed to be much more rich in lore than BC was, and I plan on reading up on it. Let’s take our time and actually read the quests
Instances - When I was leveling from 60-70 the first time, Burning Crusade had been out for about 10 months. All I could focus on was dinging 70 (not to mention I was in a guild that had very few high levels at the time, so it was almost a race to 70). I don’t think I ran any instances in that span of levels, there are still 1 or 2 that I haven’t run. In Wrath, I want to run everything in Northrend
Level 80 Raiding - We will squash it all.
*Heroic Groups - A few weeks ago we had a guild discussion about how to divvy up the raid group and any “extras”; unfortunately, although we now have the numbers to raid consistently, we often have a few extras hanging out that don’t get to go. We have for sure been trying to get anyone in that needs the gear and experience, but of course we don’t like having to leave anyone out of the raid. You can find out more about what we talked about doing here, and I’d really like to adopt that idea for raiding in Wrath. I’d like to start heroics with the first 5 to 80, then raiding with the first 10 to 80, then we will switch up groups from there. I’ve heard that they are retuning the gear in 80 heroics to make it worth the actual run of said heroic (ei - gear scales with difficulty, whereas now the heroic gear just sucks). We can talk a lot more about this when we get to Northrend

I’m going to stop here, because I’m finally able to get onto the realms now Please make some comments (here or in game) and let me know what you think and if there’s anything you’d like to add to this list!

I find myself wanting to do quick searches of people I run into in the game on the Armory system. I’m pretty lazy, so instead of doctoring a URL or doing a manual search I made up my own little armory search engine thingy for the Firefox search bar.

Truthiness Exodar Armory Search

For some reason, when I was testing, the search engine installed just fine the first time, but after that, I keep getting an error saying Firefox can’t find the file at the location or some such nonsense. the file is there and I was only able to find on the Internet that it has something to do with Firefox caching something. Hopefully it’s not just a tease. If no one else can get it to work, I’ll investigate.

Also, I’ve been using Google’s Chrome browser a lot lately and here’s how you add the armory search to the Chrome bar:

1. Right-click the chrome url bar.
2. Select ‘Edit search engines…”
3. Press ‘Add’
4. Name: ‘Armory: Exodar’
5. Keyword: ‘wow’
6. Url: ‘http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Exodar&n=%s’
7. Click ok.
8. In the Chrome bar, type something like: ‘wow lolotov’, you should be taken to my armory page.

Not a big deal, but now armory’ing peeps when looking for PUGs will be that much quicker.

Tonight was my first complete clear as ‘Main’ tank in Kara and I’m thrilled. I didn’t MT it all, namely Shade, but instead threw on heals and kept people alive. I was able to MT Prince and Nightbane though without a problem really, but we had some really wretched elemental drops on Prince, like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Three times in a row, dropped right between the tank and the group, and there was an elem (or two) on the tank at almost all times. Anyway, that’s not all that interesting, just another story from another guild that’s farming Kara.

The REAL fun comes in after our Kara runs. One of our resident warlocks, Tiburon likes to give us a chance to make 25g (apparently the easiest money you’ve ever made). He’s an honest guy, so why not? Only 5g gets you into the pot, and then we play Ritual Of Doom. The rules are simple; if you die, you win, but money isn’t any good to you dead. Tonight we played, but I had a trick up my sleeve (read the combat log):

>:]