The Angry Dwarfs

This was supposed to be a comment on Critical QQ’s blog post, but as it was getting a bit large already, I’ve decided to make a whole post out of it. This is written from Saithir’s point of view  - my other characters are not so much shapen story-wise, and not as experienced.

A new danger is drawing near – the horror that the Titans imprisoned so many centuries ago is about to break free. Yogg-Saron, the Death God. Who will defend Azeroth from him? We, the heroes of the Alliance? Are we even worthy of such title, given that some of the things we do, we do just for gold? Or does that makes us just a mercenaries, ready to take on whatever enemy, as long as it’s profitable?

Well I don’t know about you (and I would gladly listen to your tale as well), but I know I am a hero. What, ya don’t believe me now? Just sit down and let me continue…

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Popularity: 18% [?]

Yeah, so. The bad weekdays at work aren’t exactly beneficial to the amount of posts here or not even to the fun things I do ingame. With a holiday weekend though, I can at least spend some time playing and not worrying over work stuff. Happy times, too bad they end so soon ^^;

Yesterday for example I’ve spent most of my time grinding for my Cenarion Circle reputation. That took a good while, but I managed to get from just a bit over friendly to 14k/21k of Revered – I just did all the quests that I could in Silithus and killed few hundreds of Twilight Cultists. It’s not a bad reputation grind at all, because even if you can’t get any items from the Auction House, the quests give a lot of reputation, and since now I’m aiming for The Seeker (and maybe a Loremaster someday), I don’t mind doing them at all.

I also did every quest in Icecrown that wasn’t a 5-man group quest (I play a rogue – I may be overpowered, but I can’t heal myself. Give me a healer and we’ll duo them all), and there are some really awesome quests there. I don’t want to spoil any fun for anyone that might be reading, but if you haven’t yet – go and do them, you seriously won’t regret it. The Icecrown quests, the Sons of Hodir chain in the Storm Peaks, and the Battle of Darrowshire from Eastern Plaguelands – these all are truly awesome.

Oh, and the best part of this week – we finally killed Sartharion with 2 drakes. I know it’s a very late kill, but I’m still happy about it. I even got the loot which I wanted from the extra loot – some nice epic pants, that unfortunately look like they have been chewed through by the freaking dragon a few times. Their model is really awful, but oh well, I’ll find something else in Ulduar. ;)

Otherwise, it was a pretty standard week unfortunately. Get back from work, do cooking daily, do Oracle dailies, do some stuff or raid, go to sleep, repeat. Maybe the next week will bring something better – and for now, till next time and have a happy Easter Holidays.

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So once again it’s a slow weekend after the Wednesday’s success on Malygos. I haven’t got much things to do, so I’m basically runnning around the world on my rogue and doing random achievements that I previously just couldn’t be bothered with – like completing Shadowfang Keep and Dire Maul, or getting the two missing keys for The Keymaster.

I also remembered that I have enough UDE points for another TCG promotional tabard, so I finally got 25 of them – the reward was the awesome looking [Tabard of the Achiever]. Now I have to find another goal… maybe I will work on getting The Seeker from the 3000 quests achievement, I’m pretty close to that with 2754 quests completed. Oh, and I also finally fished up the [Giant Sewer Rat] from Dalaran sewers.

A bit of an interesting thing was our try for the Undying yesterday – unfortunately after we did two wings with no deaths, something went awfully wrong on Razuvious. 3 people dead, goodbye, see you later. Since nobody needed anything from the 10-man at all, we decided to not continue – the Undying was impossible already for this week, and we all had everything else.

I went to the Stranglethorn fishing contest earlier today, and it was the same deal as the previous week again. I would like to “congratulate” Morrigan of Requiem of Light for winning – and inviting your friends to spam trades and duels at other Alliance fishermen. Way to go, jerks. Even the Hordes aren’t a problem there, and they pretty much never was for me (I think they ganked me only once, long time ago) – I usually just ride by them, and they do the same to me. Well, there’s always the next week – at least this time I got a rare fish from the first catch of the tournament, which gave me the [High Test Eternium Fishing Line].

To top all the bad things off, even the 25-man raiding doesn’t go well. We had to call off Sartharion with 2 drakes raid on Thursday due to not enough people signed, and of course today’s Naxxramas raid is full with even more people signed than it’s needed. Yay for waste of an evening – I only need something like two minor upgrades from there (and one gun from Kel’Thuzad, which I’m not going to get anyway before our hunter does), and we probably won’t be doing any achievements at all. Just like always.

And now if you excuse me – I have an absurdly large dungeon to clear, so I’ll be back after I decimate some Dark Iron Dwarfs – and maybe something interesting will happen later. But I doubt it.

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Just a bit over 2 and a half hours of wipes, not an ideal raid group setup (in fact, far from it), 8 people, one nasty dragon… And we did it, and it was the best evening I had in quite a long time – all thanks to my awesome guildies. We might not be the elite pro hardcore raiding guild, but we still can do fun and challenging stuff if we want to.

Of course he didn’t drop the sword or the mount, but I don’t really mind… If he did, I would probably die from excessive amounts of happiness. And then once more from the excessive amount of gold for another Berserking enchant. ;]

Popularity: 11% [?]

About a week ago Blizzard has made an announcement about changing their addon policy. Most of the stuff was pretty much harmless – don’t interfere with gameplay, don’t obfuscate your code, don’t put offensive stuff in the addons… Things that are obvious and reasonable. And there comes the surprising bit – addons must be free of charge and they can’t include advertisements or in any form ask for donations.

I was very surprised when I read that. What the heck, people are seriously making addons that are not free? Does that kind of things even exists? I have never seen that, neither did any addon I ever used ask me for a donation. After a bit of searching I found some of the guilty ones. For example, QuestHelper was asking for donations and Carbonite had both free and premium versions, of which the free one was nagging the users with ads and stuff. By the way, does anyone have a screenshot of that? I’m curious, so if any of you have that, please send me a link or something.

Of course, the addon developers aren’t happy about the policy change. And I’ll be honest with you – below this sentence were a bunch of paragraphs about my surprise and some bashing… but after some more reading I’m not really sure anymore. I can understand why few of them are angry – they were basically making a living on their addons, while having invested a serious amount of time into them. That’s fine with me – a good work is to be rewarded (even if I personally do not use such addons), and I understand that without some kind of a donation reminder, not many people would take the time to go to the author’s website and donate there. But I also understand the reason for Blizzard to put the restriction there – even though all of these policies are is just a legal way to protect themselves, even if the threat would be minimal, and the thing that the Carbonite guys did was apparently breaking the line.

But enough about the addon authors, lets get to the interesting part – what about the players? First thing that comes to mind is that we will suffer greatly from this change. The 3.1 patch will come, but unlike with previous major patches, this time the developers won’t be working on making their addons compatible, so we will be left without them. Oh, imagine the horror that it would be if we would have to play with no addons!

Fortunately, this is not the case. Most of the addons will get updated anyway. The ones that will not? We will change them to some that will. The addons tend to get replaced over time anyway – I remember using KTM long time ago when I started raiding, and now pretty much nobody uses that, they all use Omen, and KTM is pretty much dead now since the pre-Wrath patch. So losing one mod is not really a big deal. Especially that the two most known mods that are going down are Quest Helper and Outfitter – both of which will be in a way replaced with Blizzard’s UI changes in the 3.1 patch.

Sure, the Equipment Manager that Blizzard created is in no way comparative to Outfitter – it’s just a list of sets that you can save and activate, it doesn’t change things automatically when you change forms or stances, and it also doesn’t give you a little button in Fubar or Titan Panel to change the sets in an easy way. You see, I’m not really bothered with that, as I never use the automatic features of Outfitter anyway. I tried to use it some time ago to automatically equip my Riding Crop when I was mounting up, but then 99% of the time I rode up to a mob, attacked it and killed it with the Riding Crop still sitting in my trinket slot. You just can’t help that if you go straight into combat from your mount, and it was annoying me in battlegrounds as well, so in the end I just disabled it. So if I’m using Outfitter just as a fancier version of Blizzard’s Equipment Manager, I won’t really notice the change if it stops being updated.

In fact, I will probably notice it even less – the current version works pretty well on the PTR, with the exception that the game version changed (and you have to check the “Load outdated addons” box in the client), and that’s very easy to fix. So I might just fix that myself and just continue using it. And I’m pretty much sure that someone will make a Fubar plugin that will allow to change the ingame sets with ease.

So in the end, I don’t really think we will suffer that much. Sure, some changes will have to be in order, but nothing more than a normal patch day has for us – the normal players. The developers are in a bit less of a luck, though… And we can’t really do anything about this. I know only one thing – stomping your feet and taking the toys away won’t do any good for anyone.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Just a quick update before I drop on the bed like a brick. The baby Tauren is already almost level 19, got a very pretty white kitty (though as a Hordie, I think that it’s much more common), and is doing all kind of weird quests in The Barrens. No screenie for now though, but I will add something next time :)

Why the title? I started her as a first character on that server, so of course she started with only the backpack and barely enough silver to buy skills with. That changed not long after I visited Thunder Bluff and got my two gathering professions. Now I have some bank slots, three Netherweave Bags and I finally can loot (and then most likely vendor) everything that drops from mobs. Oh, and still over 60 gold left, so there goes a mount pretty soon. :]

The secret to that? There is no big secret really. Double gathering is one part – on every server there will be alts and mains needing even the basic herbs and metal bars, you can count on that for some profit. Farming [Small Eggs] is another one. The eggs drop from any low level flying mob, and while the Alliance have it a bit easier in Westfall (there’s more space and it’s easier to pick the birds from other mobs), Mulgore isn’t a bad spot for them. [Swiftthistle] is another good thing to sell – it’s used in rogue potions for regaining energy, and there aren’t any alternatives to this potion later on – but as it’s a rare drop from lower level herbs, you can’t really farm it. So it gets quite good prices on most AH, even if you don’t sell it in full stacks.

So if I can easily have 100 gold even before level 20 (and with not that much extra time spent on that – I just pick stuff while questing mostly), I’m not going to believe anyone that will try to say that getting gold in WoW is hard. Especially some dwarves. How can a dwarf be poor?! It’s clearly against our nature! ;]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Some things just happen.

On Tuesday, the guild finally got to kill Malygos-25 again (after something like two weeks of not enough people signing), so Saithir is now a happy dwarf with the best necklace a rogue can get… and a [Frosted Adroit Handguards]. Getting the best in slot gloves for mere 20 dkp is definitely not bad, so it was worth the wait. :)

Today I responded to one of our officers looking for a dps to heroic Violet Hold, and what bosses do we get? Ichoron of course, who I’ve been lacking to complete the Lockdown achievement. While doing this, I also got the achievement for this boss, so I don’t have to hunt him again for another two months or more.

I’m also entertaining myself with doing the dailies in Scholazar Basin – I plan to get exalted with the Frenzyhearts, get their reward (the flask that turns you into a cute wolvar), and then switch them to Oracles. Doing the puppies first is easier – both take about same time, but I only want one thing from them, so I could switch back faster.

And yesterday I made a baby Tauren Hunter alt on another PvP realm. She’s level 10 at the moment and doing quite great. It’s amazing how easy can you level a hunter if you already know the class, and know how to shoot stuff, kite stuff, trap stuff (well, not yet, but I know how to do that already) and all that. She’s also a miner and herbalist – I think it’s quite the standard for a first character on the new realm, as I have to get some gold from somewhere.

Maybe I should just make her dance naked on a mailbox, though. ;]

Popularity: 16% [?]

Got the Higher Learning achievement few days ago, and a new pet. I saw it before, but I still didn’t expect it to be almost as large as me. But it was worth the effort. At least now I don’t have to keep sitting in Dalaran up till 2:00, waiting for the silly books to respawn. Well, not that I had to do it that way, but camping these spawn poins is not that easy with me spending most of the day in my workplace.

With this and the last cooking achievement my points count went over 5000. I’m still not quite sure if that’s good or bad, though. It doesn’t really seem to be much for me (and there are a lots of people that have much, much more of them), as I think of achievements as an extra challenge. They just happen when I’m bored enough – I would probably go and farm some cool pets or do all the quests even if there wouldn’t be an achievement for that. Especially the quests, as even after leveling two characters to 80 I can still find something new and awesome.

But when I look at achievements of most of the people that apply to our guild, I usually see that they have about 1500 points, which is a bit scary… Or is it not? I’m not really sure what to think of it.

Popularity: 6% [?]

In my post about grinding Sporregar reputation, I wished for WoW Reputation Calculator to be updated with Wrath info. Unfortunately it’s author is still working on it, and it doesn’t have any deadline to look out for… But few days ago I was randomly checking my characters on Be.Imba and I found a replacement for the site.

The new rep calculator (apparently it’s not really that new, just not that advertised or known) is called WoW Juju, and it is basically everything what you can ever need – at least if you care about your reputations. If not, you can still find some news and forums there, but I’m not really interested in just another news site.

The tool shows your every reputation and can provide you with different ways you can increase it. And it includes not only Burning Crusade factions like WRC, but everything. Northrend ones, old world ones, even the PvP ones.

For every faction you can see their repeatable quests, dungeons, how many of each you need to do for the next level and how many will it take to get Exalted. It also shows rewards, but that is a minor feature to me, it’s not like I need anything. ;)

Unfortunately, just as WRC, it could use some armory caching mechanism… Not much can be done when the EU Armory decides to play dead, and it does every so often. And the reputation icons could have been done better – now it’s not that easy to see if I’m Revered with a faction or already Exalted. Still, for the level of usefulness that this tools brings, I’m going to overlook this bad sides a bit and use it. If only the freaking Armory would work…

Popularity: 6% [?]

I’ve had this question ringing in my head for a while now. As it seems, it has been a topic on the US Warcraft forums (which I didn’t know even existed before the WI article), and it even become a Breakfast Topic on WoW Insider some days ago, so I guess that I’m not the only one that had that idea. And I think that’s a really good question to ask. After all, we’re doing these achievements, and not all of these are even remotely hard to get. Still, I don’t think it’s easy to choose one of them, so how about three? Let’s try that! :]

This is the one Achievement I’m most proud of, and this title is the one I have on all the time, even though I now have a few others. If you look closely at the date, you can see that I got it after the pre-Wrath patch – even though it was officially removed, you could still get the title if you had the last quest in the chain in your questbook. Which was exactly my case – I’ve done all the heroic stuff before, killed Gruul, and then came that nasty time before the expansion when nobody bothered to sign up for even the easiest raids. So I still needed to kill Magtheridon. I was frustrated (because we killed him a lot of times before and it wouldn’t be a problem if we got more than 10 people signed), but I kept the quest and eventually went to see the old Maggy with a Trade Chat PuG. Fortunately the PuG consisted of enough guildies who actually knew how to click on the cubes, so we killed him without too many problems.

This one I got this weekend. I like it a lot, because it is one of the harder dungeon achievements. The achievement requires a hunter to kite the Watchers away, and the rest of the group to unload on the boss, and it’s not exactly the easiest thing to do. We wiped for an hour on this boss just to get it right, but I felt so good when we finally made it. The time spent on perfecting our strategy (and the 120 gold repair bill afterwards) was well worth that feeling.

And the last one.  I wanted to have a Netherdrake since I saw the elf demon hunter in Nagrand and did the quest that involves flying around the Burning Legion camps on his drake. Earning enough gold on the AH and finishing the reputation chain was a long task, but I still use my Onyx Netherdrake from time to time. After all, he’s been with me through a lot.

And now a question to you. What Achievements are you proud of?

Popularity: 35% [?]