Imprisoned in the Citadel

Yesterday night we set up a group to do the Trial of the Naaru: Mercy in heroic Shattered Halls. Once you step through the door at Grand Warlock Nethekurse, a timer will start. There are three prisoners to be rescued, the first will be executed after 55min, the next 10min later and the last in another 15min. To finish the trial it will be sufficient if you manage to save the last one, which gives you 80min in total from gauntlet to dead Kargath. It might be a good idea to set a custom timer, as when you die, the "timer-debuff" is gone. There is another quest you can pick up right before the sewer entrance, called Imprisoned in the Citadel. To finish this one you need to save the first prisoner. We did not make it to solve that quest (who let the dogs out?!?), but from what info i could find it does not look like it's leading anywhere.

The bosses don't really change in SH heroic. They only hit harder and use their abilities more often... that was about it as far as i realized. The last Orc from the gauntlet is an additional "boss" in heroic, named Blood Guard Porung. I was lucky and got Spaulders of Slaughter from him. The last boss dropped... an epic gem, yay. After i finished the trials of Strength & Mercy it's only the Tenacity trial in Arcatraz left. So far it's still possible to summon people in after you finished the last boss off and all can complete the quest. Maybe we'll work on it over the next days. After the initial three trials, you'll get a 4th before you can obtain the key for the Eye: Trial of the Naaru: Magtheridon

After reading this topic on the forums i had to check out the place myself. In Nagrand (50,13) is a small hut in the mountains, inside the hut are a handful of zombie babies from different races. Glowing eyes, scary toys... this place sure has an evil aura. If you see the sandbox, I'm sure the "pet" was alive ones and they ate it.

Two more topics that catched my attention: First a blue statement telling us rare spawns replaced chests in Outlands. Thinking about it, i only saw chests in the Draenei starting area, else only in instances. The other one is about fixing sound problems. After WoW introduced more sound channels i have problems as well from time to time. It seems WoW sound is overloaded and tries to use more channels then available, resulting in eg. combat sounds not being heard - very annoying. I'll try what is suggested in the thread and see if that helps.

The Unliving are back.. stronger than ever!

With the last patch some of the TBC content slipped into the old world. Be it new ammunition, vendor sold jewelcrafting recipes (don't buy any at the AH!), etc. To my surprise we got reports from well informed Argent Dawn sources that there was increased undead activity near Deadwind Pass, around Karazhan. Together with a few guildies i traveled there to investigate the situation.

The closer we came to the tower the colder the air would become... fog was billowing above the floor. We encountered several Unliving Residents around level 69-70. We slew a few, already imagining piles of gold, but alas they don't have an updated loot-table - of course not. Close to the Tower are a few mages from «The Violet Eye» and if you use a spyglass from the mountain across you can see the backdoor to the Tower, else not much is happening there yet.

On a sidenote, many have problems with the new patch. If you have high latency and/or lag spikes while in a raid, make sure you don't have an old version of CTRA (they had some bugs in the first updated ones), which can cause trouble. In addition go and check your cache folder if you have the needed folders, as the patch somehow screwed up the creation of those. If you're lacking any of those you should create the empty folders yourself and restart WoW. It should look like

...\World of Warcraft\Cache\WDB\enGB\
(for the english EU client, for others you have to adjust the last folder name)

Once you restarted WoW the folder should get populated with the *.wdb cache files again. This will speed up your gameplay performance.

click-click-click... Tonk

Yesterday i joined Impact for a raid into BWL. A nice bunch of people, i very much enjoyed the time. Nearly forgot to add that lucky me could snatch the Head of the Broodlord Lashlayer during the raid. Not sure if the rewards will be of much use in TBC, but i want to experience the nice scripted questlines... and heh, in TBC they will yield XP as well. =)
As was being expected after the recent patch, it turned into a stress test for updated mods and configurations. Personally i had to realize that with my new actionbar mod Bongos, there were no real cooldowns on my skills. Sometimes a skill would grey out (that's why i did not realize before) but in 95% of the time i could not distinguish if the skill was available. It was an interesting experience to go through BWL and just go after my "feeling" for when and which skill to use. For this mess, it went ok i think. *chuckles* This happened as i did download the mod with a direct link, while the main sites were down, and the author does not have a proper readme.txt included. He also offers OmniCC which fixes the problem and also adds a visible cooldown on eg. items i have in my bank - really nice.

One thing that stroke immediately as highly annoying was the "click-bug" that was introduced with the new patch. Basicly while in a raid you'll hear a clicking-noise every time someone joins/leaves the raid channel... drives you insane fast! To fix it either use the following macro or search the mod-sites for a tiny addon against it.. i saw 3-4 different ones.

/script if not _clickfixed then __xps=PlaySound; function PlaySound(snd) if (snd~="igCharacterInfoTab") then __xps(snd); end end _clickfixed=1; end

During the last days i also saw the first Hippogryph Hatchling. It's one of the special rewards from the WoW TCG. Looks quite funny. I also heard that with the last patch the idle animation from the Zergling was improved... have to look out for it.

I started to update my addon list on the right and clean it up or change broken links. As some of the addon websites still have trouble, it might take a few days until it's complete, but most links are updated already.

Apparently there is a gold dupe bug that surfaced first on the Mannoroth server. Blizzard tried to contain the damage and deleted a ton of posts and suspended many players. Rumours say a GM showed up on the bridge to AH and perma silenced and sleep every player who was talking about it. I'm not sure how exaggerated those reports are, but seems Blizzard did not handle it with the sensitive but the huge Ogre-Hammer. Although they did not set back the affected servers, which seems odd. Some more info on the EJ Forums.

A last tip for our engineers: Since the patch there is a new schematic for a Steam Tonk Controller available at the Darkmoon Fair. It will cost you 40 tickets. The controller itself is rather cheap to produce, has 50 charges and more important is BoE so you can hand it out to friends as well. From what i hear you can summon the tonks everywhere but in the large cities. So yes, also in raid instances. ;)