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.

Kidnap & Ransom Insurance

That's an insurance you could have sold to the players on the Mal'Ganis (pvp) server a few weeks ago (i missed this event before). Apparently members from «Goon Squad» captured the Theramore Isle flightmaster and kited him around, holding him for ransom. Alliance should buy out certain items from the neutral AH and they would release him. To underline their demands they also kidnapped the Ratchet flightmaster. Despite the fact that it sure did piss people off and interrupted their gameplay, i found this approach to world PvP hillarious. After this was going on for around five hours and more players complained about it, a GM struck down the flightmasters and killed them (so they could respawn). I laughed... :D

Yesterday in BWL i tested the Tonks a bit more. While waiting for the rest of the raid to appear it was great fun to have a huge Tonk battle going on. My first thought tho was, use the Tonk to explore a dungeon?! I can report you can only move around in a certain radius (quite large tho) around your character... if you drive too far, the effect will break. One thing i discovered is, that the Tonks only have a collision about their size. This enabled me to drive it below the closed doors into the room with Chromaggus or Nefarian. Interesting sideeffect.

Now to some funny videos i saw recently. Everyone knows that WoW can also affect your RL, but what happens when Leeroy tries to destroy your business?

And did you see the first recording of the Burning Crusade Opening Cinematics?

Did you see the Skullcrusher Mountain movie? I knew gnomes are insane! Wow, i really enjoy the more and more growing machinima szene! The song from the Creepy Doll movie reminded me about a card from the new boardgame Formidable Foes (Fürchterliche Feinde). ;) Also watch the other movies from spiffworld, there you'll learn that size does matter and in spring people are doin' it outside.

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.

Caverns of Time open

Since the patch it seems that some "pieces" of the new content also made it into the "old world". Not sure if it's a bug or some developer thought "Hey, let's hold out a carrot as a teaser - free marketing". One new area that can be accessed now, is the the Caverns of time - the door is gone, so is our friendly dragon that was standing there before. I wonder how people are supposed to hand in their quests now. Once you enter you'll encounter a bunch of NPCs roaming/guarding the cave. Some are occupied in experiments, some have interesting conversations how they temper with the timelines. Some of those NPCs are Draenei and Bloodelves, so if you want to see them "live", there you can.

The only interesting NPC you can interact with in there, beside a booze vendor and an armorer called Yarly (YA RLY, that's his name!) is Provisioner Galgrom.
He sells some of the standard, but high-level food, drinks and ammunition from the expansion:
Garadar Sharp
Filtered Draenic Water
Impact Shot
Wicked Arrow



The new ammunition can be bought from several vendors, the food/drinks only at him afaik. Nice stuff to take with you while adventuring and if you're, like me, allergic against magic food.

Here are a few more pics, but there is lots more to see if you've never been there. Maybe during the next days I'll post some screenshots how it did look before with the large hour-glass in the middle.