Justice & Candy

Recently I'm trying to get groups going to visit the Emperor Thaurissan in BRD, as I'd like the Hand of Justice for my DPS gear. It's quite funny to go back deep into BRD after such a long time. The more I'm astonished how many lvl 60 players did not finish the Princess quest there. Good for me, as this makes it easier to find people to go with.. and if you take peeps from the LFG channel, chance is 75% it's another lvl 60 searching for the HoJ. ;)

I added WoW BlueTracker to the list of worthy links. If you're lazy like me when it comes to spend a lot of time in the official forums, it helps to spy out posts with official info quite quickly.

Concerning my raiding efforts, i recently visited BWL & Naxx with Azeroth's Fury and have to say there are some very nice people in this community. For a change they seemed to care about trialists and different people asked how you liked it and showed interest. And i won't forget a certain itemcheck Samson did during the Nefarian fight, really made me laugh. ;) Their raid days (especially friday/saturday) were not so much after my taste tho. Therefore i gladly accepted an invitation from HFC to join their ranks... BUT in the last minute they reconsidered and decided they won't replace the warriors they lost, as they had a bunch already. Talk about good internal communication. *rolleyes*
So for the moment I'll just join some 20 ppl raids and fill out here and there; use the time to get other things done. There is always opportunity to have.

Referring again to the Upperdeck card game, some players started to check out the 2nd part of the ingame-items you can attain by UDE points. If you don't play any tournaments and just want to "buy" the points, how does $1,995 for the Ogre Suit sound?!? Check the discussion thread here.

The Hallow's End event will very soon be over, if you still have of your Hallow's End Pumpkin Treat, check how many days are left on it (as those will decay). If you want to refresh it, to keep them a bit longer, do the following: Place your "old" stack in your bank. Buy some "fresh" candy from the candy vendor and then drop the old candy on the fresh one. Aaaaand.. again 14 days time to use it. ;)

Super-Duper-Safe-Rare-Delete-System

Yesterday i joined a group to LBRS. While i enjoyed the trip and finally being high up on the damage meters, i picked up some blue Doomshot arrows during the party. Later in i got short on bag space (blame my dwarvish dice for that *grins*) and wanted to destroy the arrows. I tend to sort my bags while fighting to save downtime. To my surprise - i must have missed the announce - there is now a super duper safe system in place that will ask you to confirm with typing in "delete". C'MON.. i don't want to format my hard-drive.. i just want to throw away an item. The old pop-up asking you to confirm with a mouseclick on YES was not enough? You must be kidding me. I hate it when games start to patronize their players. Who is so stupid to destroy something valuable by clicking yes "by accident". If anyone knows a mod that will change this behaviour, please let me know. Maybe I'll make a post in the official forum as well. *rolleyes*

During the run yesterday i picked up Blackcrow, which makes a nice addition to my changing DPS gear, from Shadow Hunter Vosh'gajin. We all hear how players complained about getting scammed by fake trades or COD mails on the server from time to time. The next step is tricking a raid community to get their dungeon ID and kill "their" boss. Apparently this happened to a guild, after they refused to willingly give their instance to another raid group. The abusers tried to randomly invite people from that community, make them leader and then quickly enter the instance. Quite emotional stuff in the forums. I have to disagree with the blue poster, it's a bad thing to post it... people should be aware of the possibility and be cautious about such things. What do you do if it happens to you? Stay inside and change to masterlooter, you're the leader after all. Should they kill what they want... hehe.

about Tanks and Turtles...

TBC still under construction... Blizzard announces the expansion will come end of January and the beta will continue. Although Eyonix tells us they'll patch in content, part of what players without the expansion can see/use, will that keep us happy/busy until January? What will you do to entertain yourself? Or just freeze your account until TBC comes out?

Personally, I just respecced to try out something new. Thulf was a tank since day 1 (believe me or not, but i leveled with being protection) and i was really reluctant to try out some other specc. To do this had two reasons:
1. All raid community offers i recently got involved only off-tanking.. not really necessary to be prot for that.
2. I thought i could try out something new, which might enable me to level faster in TBC.
While leveling to 60 was fine with prot, in the Outlands all mobs got boosted in stamina, etc. therefore some more DPS will be helpful. As i never thought about respeccing and most of the time have been MT, i always passed on DPS gear for others. Hahaha.. gives me some kind of dilemma now, as I've to work on my gear again. Although, after i got myself Lionheart Helm & Titanic Leggings crafted, my DPS gear is quite ok. Luckily i snatched a few things from MC as well. So the main issue is to find appropriate weapons right now, but that will hopefully fix itself after the next raids, and be it to ZG. With my actual build fury/prot, I'm finally able to solo the elite field duty quests in Silthius, something i could never think of before. Although i should still be a viable tank. I'll keep you posted how it develops. For those interested, i changed my specc in the CTprofile and also added a new entry with my DPS gear - which is heavily subject to change. :)

Yesterday i saw Fikumdik acquired a turtle mount from the WoW trading Card game. It looks much better then i thought and a gnome on a turtle is hillarious. The mount itself only moves at running, not mount, speed... it's a slow turtle, what do you expect? ;)

Happy Hallow's End

As some might have realized already, I'm back from my trip. Perfect timing to enjoy the spooky holidays in WoW. The picture shows me and some guild mates, while having fun last year doing a lot of dungeon crawls being skeletons or gnomes. Although after you played WoW through the betas and since retail, personally, I start to become disappointed with those holiday events. How hard is it to create at least one or two small, but fun, NEW quests? The collector in us would be grateful for more "unique" items to stash in the bank. I understand Blizzard works on the expansion, but logging in, experiencing lag (as everyone checks on the Hallow's End content) and realizing same, same, nothing changed... leaves me asking myself what i pay my monthly fee for again.

Talking about the expansion, the available amount of information exploded recently, as the closed beta started and surprisingly - or not - Blizzard lifted the NDA. Cheap advertising for the expansion. Speculations are all over the place concerning the release date. As Blizzard will need to offer a large patch on release for the game anyway, to bring the ones not buying the expansion up to speed, it is very likely they will distribute the CDs very fast and patch all changes later into the live game. IMO they'll bring it out this year before the christmas business hits the stores.

Coming back to Hallow's End, did you know you can gain the Invocation of the Wickerman buff during this time? Visit the Wickerman Festival near the Undercity and look out for "Wickerman Guardian Ember", to smear some ashes in your face. If you don't see any, try to kill one of the Guardians. If that's not helping, wait until the hay-giant is burned around 20h server time. ;)