My bucket list of stuff i want to finish off and prepare before the expansion is almost complete. With “level herbalism to 450” out of the way, i only got “farm Anzu for the Reins of the Raven Lord mount” and “bore yourself to death while getting fishing up to 450” left on the list.

With only seven days to go, my biggest concern is not weather i will make it or not, but what the hell i should do with all the herbs i gathered and stored on in my guild bank. 

So, the million dollar questions today are:

✔ Should i just mill all the herbs and craft glyphs to sell? Glyphs are not exactly flying of the shelf, but its a steady income that probably will continue do well as people are leveling new characters through the shattered Azeroth. 

✔ Should i sell the stacks directly? The demand for herbs is quite high for the same reason as above. People that power level alchemy or inscription need a lot of herbs. 

✔ Should i level another alchemist for one more transmute cooldown? Transmute was one of the biggest money makers in Wrath of the Lich King. Having two cooldowns each day instead of one is a pretty big deal! 

My gut feeling tells me that the last option is my best investment for the future.

December 02, 2010, 4:11pm | Leave a comment: Comments

Call 911! My heart is fainting… *nerdgasm*

I just got a severe case of nerdgasm after i race changed my paladin. I never liked taurens, since they make me feel slow and clumsy, but this fella sure looks bad ass deluxe with my current gear. 

Argh, things just complicated again. Last couple of days i thought i had settled for tanking with my death knight in Cataclysm, but this stir things up inside me. Paladins are not only fun and diverse to play, they can finally look awesome while being righteous and judge people in the face!

Back to the drawing board. I think i need to take this bastard for ride in a few raids to try him out. 

Eat shit, dear old Charger! This kodo will eat you for breakfast!

November 27, 2010, 3:32pm | Leave a comment: Comments

A small trike for a big boned troll

Like everyone rest on the planet of Azeroth i did my Bilgewater Cartel-grind and got a flaming sultry trike mount for the trouble. I still think that the engineering bike is way more sexy, but the trike looks awesomely funny with a huge troll in the driver seat. Since the driver is placed so close to the ground, my feet dig a few inches into the mud while i drive.

The grind itself where piss easy. I did marathon run Northrend heroics two nights a row and that got me from friendly to exalted standing with Bilgewater Cartel.

As a bonus i got to smash two flies in one hit, since the grind also generated a lot of Justice Points that will be saved for a few pieces of starting gear in Cataclysm. 

November 27, 2010, 5:46am | Leave a comment: Comments

Almost feel sorry for this buyer. Apparently there are still people that dont know that Vanishing Powder can be bought from Inscription vendor for a couple of silver. 

November 25, 2010, 5:48pm | Leave a comment: Comments

Blizzard have tried to teach us to not stand in fire and to pay attention to our surroundings since day one, but still they design spells like the screenshot above. No wonder why people still fuck up. Can you see the difference, in a split second, between the friendly AoE heal Evanescence and the nasty Death and Decay from Lady Death Whisperer? Another example is the green slime pools in the Putricide encounter. Right now we can´t really trust our eyes and have to rely on screen warnings from mods like DBM. Thats a flaw in the design in my opinion. 

Suggestion for the designers @ Blizzard: Its pretty simple. Make harmful and friendly spells have a unique distinct color scheme and stick to it! Raid leaders around the world will thank you!

November 25, 2010, 7:59am | Leave a comment: Comments

What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been since the last blog update. I will try to keep the long story short.

The guild made up of swedish IRL-friends went into hibernate once again during the summer. As foreseen. The guild chat echoed like the empty streets of Dalaran on our low populated server. The dead server was now stone dead. 

I had made an pretty extensive bucket list of stuff i could solo with Hensley, to keep me occupied until the break was over. But as the summer turned into autumn and almost no one even logged in on rainy cold days, my patience was over. AK was dead and beyond resurrection. The few active souls that hung in there during the summer and made occasionally Alt-runs in ICC started to transfer or join other guilds.

It was about time for me to find another guild. 

Enter Shellac
After a few weeks of searching and writing a few applies i found a guild called Ice on Executus (EU) that where raiding hardcore, but only three (!!) times a week. This is extremely rare and made me really happy, since that was a schuedule i could keep up with as a father to a one year old kid and with a hectic real life in the background. The only problem was that Ice where already on LKHC25 and had all other hard mode bosses (11/12) on farm. I was pretty far behind with gear and had no experience of hard modes in ICC. But i tried my luck and wrote the longest guild application i ever written to convince them to bring me aboard.

After a long dialog with the management they where interested/convinced to give me a trial spot in the raiding team, but not as a Blood Death Knight - they wanted my under geared Protection Paladin. *doh*

I transfered over to Executus and quickly became a part of the raiding core. After a few weeks i was geared to the teethes with shiny i277 epics and we where plowing through ICC25-drake achievements on hard mode (for the challenge!). Everything went smooth as butter except the king himself. Fast forward a few months and here we are - still busting our asses on the bastard. A lot of people have quietly given up and even though they still show up for raids, it has become painfully clear that we might won´t make it before Deathwing tear Azeroth a part. Right now it seems like the only progress we make is - backwards. /sadpanda 

The Return of the Troll
With only a few weeks to go before Cataclysm, old-time friends and hibernating guild mates have started wake up from the slumber and are reactivating their accounts once again. My old 25-man guild have disbanded and reformed into a smaller and more cosy 10-man guild made up with only real life friends - which sounds very appealing! I miss playing among IRL-friends and i miss my grumpy troll. So, like a an teenage girlfriend rebound, i am planning to return to my old server and my friends. The best thing: they need a tank for the setup and i can pretty much pick any tanking class i want to do the job. This means that i can and probably will return to my tanking troll (or continue on my paladin if i change my mind in the last minute - again!). The only bad news is that they insist on staying on the low populated RPPvP-server that i hate passionately. But you can´t have everything, it seems. 

November 24, 2010, 6:38pm | Leave a comment: Comments

Hellscreams version of Orgrimmar on the background. A confused Death Knight on a ePeen-mount in the foreground. 

Cataclysm Beta
After spending to much time in all the WoW betas to date, i kind of promised myself not to participate in the Cataclysm beta. I wanted, for once, to enjoy the finished product and explore the new zones for the first time on launch day. 

But then it came. The invitation. My editor had once again hooked my up through Blizzard EU PR and wanted me to write an article about the new starting zones for the magazine. Since i am pathetically weak and short of cash i simply could not resist. It´s a dirty job, but someone got to do it. :P

On the bright side, i will get the opportunity to try out the new class changes to help me pick a main character for Cataclysm. Thats right, i am not sure if will continue playing my Death Knight. It´s been a blast, but the changes so far are not making me super excited. The new abilities look a bit underwhelming, the changes to our resource mechanic seems goofy and the loss of flexibility (aka being able to tank with all three talent trees) is a bit disappointing. For now that is. Everything is changing rapidly in the beta.

But i know for sure that i want to continue to be a damage soaking meat shield and only considering to switch to another tanking class. So maybe its time to play my vanilla-old warrior or my neglected paladin-alt for Cataclysm. 

With this said, i will focus on testing and use this space to share my impressions on the trees for protection Warriors/Paladins and blood Death Knights. 

There will be blood
I was preparing a summery of my first impressions on the new blood tanking tree, based on a few runs in the two new 5-man instances (underwater Throne of Tides and rusty Blackrock Caverns) in the Cataclysm beta. But then, like thunder from a clear sky, Blizzard announced that they will totally revamp the trees with a heck load of changes and reduce the amount of talent points to 31. Holy smoke. Thats huge stuff. So, i decided to wait with my impression until the next big beta update that will be deployed in a few weeks. 

July 09, 2010, 7:00pm | Leave a comment: Comments

The RealID a-bomb dropped on everyone a few days ago and caused a mass hysteria without proportions in the gaming community (aka not only among WoW players). Basically Blizzard wants to use RealID on their public forums for their games to get rid of forum trolls that hide behind anonymity, which means that everyone will be posting with their real names. That´s it. I am really caught by surprise by the outcry and drama against this for a couple of reasons. 

✔ It´s optional!

If you to stay anonymous and hide behind a nickname, please do so. Nobody is forcing you to use RealID in-game and no one will be forcing you to post on the forums. 

✔ It´s like Facebook for f**k sake.

Over 400 million users already post stuff about their personal life, which is fully searchable by search engines, with their real names. And i am pretty sure that the vast majority of the gaming community got a Facebook-account. If you really are concerned about your having your real name out there on the scary web of internet - just pull the plug!

So, stop the mass hysteria (but please, still use Hysteria on your best DPS in-game!!). The world (of warcraft) is not going to end with real names on the forum and i hope that Blizzard stand strong in the storm of shit that are hitting them now. 

By the way: the gaming site Kotaku sums it up pretty well over here. 

July 09, 2010, 6:02am | Leave a comment: Comments

Bye bye Frost-tanking! 

So the bomb dropped on tanking death knights today. Tri-tank-spec and the flexibility that comes with it will be gone in Cataclysm. Blood will be the new revamped dedicated tanking tree for death knights.

My first reaction: this is just sad! One of the reasons that i picked death knight over other tanking classes was the almost endless flexibility. I really liked that i could mix and match a spec for every tanking occasion there is in the game. Unholy AMZ/AMS on spell damage heavy encounters, Frost for avoidance and duel-wielding madness and Blood for pure survivability. Ever since the duel-spec system was introduced i have been running with two tanking specs and changed depending on raid setup (No enhancement shaman in the group? No problem, i will just switch to Frost for haste-buff etc). Will miss that. /violin

My second reaction: After a walk with the dog, fresh air in my lungs and some undisturbed thinking i came to the conclusion that tanking will probably be more fun after all. With a dedicated tree, Blizzard can focus on giving us more fun tools to play with without worrying about the balance between the trees. And Blood was my “main” tanking tree and the spec i, overall, enjoy most anyway. 

On my wishlist: I am still dreaming of a AoE-taunt like the Templars in Aion. Imagine a death grip that pulls several targets! I would also like the death knight iconic spell army of the dead to be more useful as a tank. I also hope they keep blood worms and make them contribute to the tanking by generating threat for the tank (the real reason: they look damn cool!)

Progress report in ICC10 Heroic:
Pretty good (and fun!) first week. We managed to down the first seven bosses. /clap

✔ Lord Marrowgar
✔ Lady Deathwhisper
✔ Gunship Battle (Lulz!)
✔ Deathbringer Saurfang
✔ Festergut
✔ Rotface

Better late then never. Happy Easter!

April 07, 2010, 5:11am | Leave a comment: Comments

Finally some progress!

Finally a well deserved high pitch echo of nerdscreams on Vent!

The blood that floats in Crimson Halls are no longer ours. We have been stuck at Blood-Queen for a while. The mechanic for the fight is not very complicated, but requires some focused raiders to not fuck up the bite rotation and spread out and stay alive during air phase.

We have had the fight for a while (we have been killed by the enrage timer several times), but since we lost/kicked (good riddance btw) a few raiders we have had trouble with getting our raids full. With some fresh blood in our setup - we are back on track. Feels great! 

And, oh btw, we downed Lich King in 10-man. Which means that we will start doing some heroic 10-man raiding this week. 

March 29, 2010, 5:29am | Leave a comment: Comments