It's about vampires and shit !

If you are like me and have ventured into the Crimson Halls you were in for a bit of a shock when you got to Lana'thel. At a certain point in time you'll get a buff that allows you to do 100% more damage for 0% threat :O :O When i saw that i must admit my little wizzer went bonkers and the dpswhore in me was awakened once again \o/ (not that it ever died really...)

Now in all seriousness, Lana'thell is one hell of a fun (and imho challenging) encounter, and that's something that has struck me for this entire raid instance. Especially the last two wings have extremely original and fun new aspects.

Take Putricide for example, not only is he a nice reference to Futurama but it's also a very non-standard'ish encounter with lots of thing you can fail on. Blizzard really impressed me with these first 3 wings and that's actually very promising for the Frozen Halls and the Lich King himself, it can be a major letdown because i have high hopes but thusfar they haven't failed to meet my expectations (yet).

While we only had a few attempts on both bosses it still feels like this will take a while until we'll have it down and on farm, which is awesome. Finally, finally there's a raid (on normal mode) which isn't a complete cakewalk and that's something i have been waiting on since the launch of WoTLK. Heroic ToTC is still hard and i'm glad they've put in something a bit challenging but i was really hoping they wouldn't fuck up ICC as it's still something of epic proportions for me. The home of the Lich King, one of the ultimate baddies in the wowuniverse !

Let's be honest, i was a bit worried when i saw the first wing which wasn't exactly challenging to begin with, but that's probably done on purpose so pugs could actually grab some gear from there as well. (and better pugs will no doubt progress through the other wings as well)

So yeah, i'm actually satisfied with this raid up until now so you won't hear me complain :P

...

...

Except about frost mages and rogues in pvp, i will complain about those !

Lvl 1 with a massive ARCANITE REAPER hoooooooo !

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the pinnacle of epicness which is my blog *cough*...Yes, just let me live in my own little world will ya !

Anyway, heirloom items ! For the people who aren't familiar with this relative new term i'm gonna quickly explain what it is.

Heirloom items are BoA items...confused yet? BoA stands for "Bind on Account", so basicly they are items you can send over to your alt/main on the same account but can't send it to a different account.

That's the basic knowledge you should have before reading any further. A while back (at the last blizzcon i reckon) blizzard announced they wanted to do something with items bound to one account so you can "give" your lower lvl alts otherwise BoP items. There was a lot speculation (and drama) about this, a couple ideas were that you could swap BoP items between characters on the same account or items  you could buy with a common shared valuta on one account where all the characters on that account could use that valuta.

And as usual it was somewhere in between :P 

You'll be able to collect tokens which you are able to spend on items, BoA items to be precise. Then you'll be able to send those tokens/items to your alt to kit him/her out from the start, so yeah, lvl 1 with arcanite reapers !

No, not really but it's gonna be very similar texturewise and statwise (at max lvl ofcourse).

I, for one, really like this especially because you can only upgrade that item (be it a piece of armor or a weapon) every 10 levels.  So at lvl1 you get the first version of the item and on lvl 10 you'll be able to upgrade its stats, which pretty much cancels out twinks .

It also doesn't take away from the use of instances because instanceblues will be better at some point than your BoA item, and ofcourse for the quests/xp.

I'll be keeping an eye on those BoA items and update you lot in the future how to obtain them and on what you can spend them.

-Dave out

Grand Theft Kodo

Hello there !

Sit down, grab a drink and join me in the madness that is Brewfest for a bit. It's been on live since the 20th but i just started to get into it yesterday, and i must admit it's still as fun as it was last year.

The barrelrun are made easier i reckon, correct me if i'm wrong but i spotted an additional basket of fruit alongside my path this year? Anyway, once you get the route straight you'll get a massive amount of tokens this way, it's really, really easy.

The barkingquest (which wasn 't bugged from the start this year \o/) is also very easy, once you barked at everything you can just hop off the ram and mount your normal mount and speed away to victory :P

Now, the new addition to brewfest: the additional boss in BRD. The setting and how you can get to him are very well done, you climb in a sort of drilldevice and dig yourself a way to the boss, which is extremely cool. The boss also has a short respawntimer when you kill him, so you don't have to reset the instance every time that way you can farm him as many times possible.

And i say possible, because to engage him in combat you need the daily quest for it.

The loot he drops is fairly good and is on par with some of the badgepieces (trinkets, dagger) and -as usual with a seasonal boss- he drops cool gimmicks.

For example you can get a trinket that summons a beermaiden that will aid you in combat, or you get an item that can create a portal directly into the Grimm Guzzler.

But the main loot is probably the mount, either a brewfest ram or a kodo that seem to have a small percentage of dropping. It was weird to log in IF and see a bucketload of people on kodo's, so the percentage is high enough to have this much of a saturation atleast :P

Anyway, that's it for this small post as college is awaiting my heroic return again.

-Dave out

Mount'o'mania

Goodmorning everyone

It seems we'll gonna get a bucketload of new mounts in the next expansion, there's even an achievement to collect 75 (!!!) mounts.

A few of them are ofcourse hard to get while others are relatively easy, going from downing certain bosses with a couple requirements to just paying a "small" fee (see yesterday's blogpost) for them.

Our friends at mmo-champion posted a nice little list of new mounts and their achievements.

As you can see there are a lot of new mountspells, but especially the new bear mount and the new engineeringmount look very promising. Especially since there are a lot of people who were rather disappointed when Blizzard announced they would remove the Amani War Bear from the timed event in ZA in patch 3.02. Now everyone has a chance to ride on a massive bear (i still think the Amani Bear looks cooler though, goggles on a bear is not my kind of thing...)

The engineering mount on the other hand will be BoE. Yes, you read that right, BoE. Everyone will be able to ride the Mechano Hog even if you're not an engineer !

It sounds great in theory, but there are alot of engineers who are rising up with a (imho) perfect valid statement. In TBC we had the helicopter , which was BoP, for engineers. It was sort of a reward for levelling engineering to the maximum, then you could make a helicopter and prove you have spent the time (and mostly money) to level engineering. 

Now everyone will have a Mechano-Hog, which takes away the charm of engineering as a lot of engineers were looking forward to ride around Azeroth showing off the new ride. But noooo, everyone will be able to do that now and therefor a lot of people are complaining. (Yes, the epeen got kicked in the eballs with this).

But for moneyhungry engineers (like me) this is great ! You'll be able to make mounts and put them on the AH for massive prices (especially during the first months) and they will sell. Mountcollectors will go nuts on them and people who want to complete their achievements will buy one aswel so there will be a rather large market for it. 

Let's just hope the mats aren't too expensive so i can make a huge profit to buy my Wooly Mammoth :P

-Dave out.

Moneysink ahoi !

Good day my lovely minions of the cookie kingdom !

It seems we'll be getting enough moneysinks in Wrath to spend our "hard" earned gold on. First and foremost there will be Cold Weather Flying (which is not that much in comparison to the rest ofcourse) which will cost around 950G. This new skill will allow you to fly with your flying mount in Northrend, do note this is only possible from lvl77 and upwards.

The second one will be the ring you can get from Dalaran for a whopping 8500G, this ring can quickly teleport you to Dalaran. You can compare it with the neckpiece you get from the BTattunement that allows you to teleport to BT (the one after you killed Illidan).

The next moneysink will be the multipassengermount, it will cost around 14500G and is by far the most expensive mount thusfar. It will allow you to transport 3 people (including yourself) and it's a giant, frigging mammoth ! I mean, what more do you want, you'll be riding with your friends on a bigasss elephant demolishing everything that crosses your path !

Ofcourse there are other moneysinks aswel in the form of levelling professions, which will be rather expensive at the start, especially if you buy everything from AH to speed it up.

So a piece of advice would be, get that gold now while it's easy by doing dailies, selling epic gems you bought with badges or just exploiting the AH and make a profit of lazy-dumb people.

-Dave out.

The lore and you.

Goodmorning/afternoon/evening/night/

As some of you might know i'm really interested in the story behind Warcraft, the lore as they call it. I've read most of the books (atleast the ones i was able to get a hold off, damn you proxis for not shipping 1 book i still don't have !) and are a frequent visitor of wowwiki to read up on major lorecharacters/events and items.
I think it's a very compelling and solid story that provides a decent backbone to the game(s) we play today. From Warcraft 1 throughout Wow the story has been further developped and explained and new stuff has been added. But not everything is as appreciated by the fanbase as Blizzard would've liked, especially when TBC was first launched / announced lore-addepts were up in arms about the Draenei and the Bloodelves because it wasn't "true" to the lore we have known for such a long time.
I can only imagine people needed a bit of time to accept the fact Blizzard wants to further develop their story as they probably have everything lined up for the coming expansion(s) and warcraft games. The same is happening again with this expansion where we will face 2 gigantic lore-characters in the form of Arthas/Lich King and Malygos and possible/maybe beat/kill them. Now, i do say this carefully as that is not known at all, we might just subdue them or they might flee from battle after we've reduced them to a pile of rubbish.
But nonetheless this is a catalyst for those lore-addepts to start up the QQ-train on the forums again, spouting random statements as "blizzard is destroying the lore" and "omg, we can't kill arthas for x and y reasons".
Let me say one thing: A mmo is all about progression, that counts for everything: skills, gear, professions, content and yes....storyline. So start accepting the fact the story won't be stuck in 1 certain phase forever, it will further develop and new faces will show up (for example the son of Grom Hellscream, Garosh)

So far my little rant

-Dave out

Achievements

Hello there, it's been a while but i've been busy PLAYING BETA. Yes, that's right, yours truly has a betakey /flex. So i was able to test out a few tidbits of the new Wrath of the Lich King and i can tell you this: it's very, very awesome.
But that's for a later post, first i wanted to review the new achievementsystem Blizzard has put in and its use.

So, what is an achievement? An achievement is something you get for doing something special, reaching a goal ingame. This could be discovering all of outlands or simply dinging 70.
The first thing that i noticed was that this system is very friendly towards all groups of the game, either to the hardcore players who want to achieve bosskils and to the casual players who are limited to their playtime and aren't able to raid all that much/far. This is very blizzlike tbh, they cater to the 2 major groups ingame to decrease the whining from the community.
For every achievement you get (you'll see it when you achieve something, it has a little animation and a fancy textured messagebox) you gain achievementpoints and an entry in the achievementpanel. This achievementpanel is also something new, it's a window where you have all the types of achievements you can get (raidachievement, exploration, dungeon, misc,...) and you also see what achievements you haven't completed yet, which sets a goal and gives you a direction what to do next.
Anyway, back to those achievementpoints. At this point in time there is not much use for those but they promised us to do something with the achievementpoints. I really wonder what it could be, although there are enough rumours on the internet about the use of those achievementpoints, nothing has been confirmed yet.

Now, this system seems like a good addition to the game and it looks like a system that satisfies the community....buuuut the wowcommunity wouldn't be the wowcommunity if it haven't found something to cry about.
"Cheap content", "Stolen from xbox live", "omg too much time to complete them all",....You can probably continue the list with multiple lines of "QQQQQQQ"
I don't think this is cheap content, it's not something that we've seen before and it's again a goalbased system. It will keep players busy in times when they are a bit bored (between raids, between battlegrounds,...) It's a little addition to the game that will be very good for the completionists in this game, who want to achieve everything possible (for them) in this game.
And when it's known what will be done with those achievementpoints it could be even more involved for other groups of players aswel.
Is it stolen from xbox live? C'mon, do you really think xbox live was the first system with achievements? Baldur's Gate had achievements for pete's sake.
Achievementsystems is a system that has been popular in the last wave of consoles (xbox live, playstation online) and it's not strange for Blizzard to jump on this bandwagon and implement an achievementsystem in their game. It will keep people playing and aiming for higher achievements, which should be the main goal in an mmorpg. Improving your character, testing the limits and achieving all you can while having loads of fun.

Wel, i did my achievement for the day *zzzziiinnggg* "Made a blogpost"

-Dave out