Category: World of Warcraft

[World of Warcraft] Word was running rampant through the streets, the plague was here! People were falling dead everywhere and nobody could stop it. Finally, a live event from Blizzard. What a treat!

Oh wait, never mind:

Beginning at 4:00 AM PDT on 9/17 we will be issuing rolling restarts to all realms to apply a hotfix. We expect this to resolve several issues:

Hakkar’s spell Corrupted Blood can no longer exist outside of Zul’Gurub

Turns out Hunter pets would get infected in ZG and they would dismiss them only to resummon in town. Personally, I think this was cool.

Bah.

Update: It appears that the hotfix remedy concocted to combat the recent Azerothian outbreak has not yielded desired results. At this time, our medical staff is continuing to develop an effective cure. We look forward to ensuring the health and vitality of the citizens of Azeroth in the near future.

– Ethic

[World of Waitcraft] After my failed attempt at EQ2 last night I figured some WoW would be in order so I logged on in.

Authenticating… and nothing.

SSDD.

– Ethic

[World of Warcraft] The big news is a new raid instance (which I will probably never run) and a new battleground. The new battleground, Arathi Basin, is a 15 on 15 battle where you must control as many of the 5 resources as possible and be the first to accumulate 2000 combined resources. It was still a bit laggy today, but I’ll be back with a fuller review once it has been out a few days.

Also, for those who care, they have opened 2 RP PvP realms.

DC

[World of Warcraft] Sending a special tip out to the person that invited me to join their guild last night.

Don’t just invite random people to your guild without even talking to them. That move alone guarantees I won’t join your guild.

That is all.

– Ethic

[World of Warcraft] My undead warlock hit level 18 last night. I learned a few new tricks during this level, as well as gaining an interesting new skill.

The new skill is called “Create Soulstone”. What this does is it creates a soulstone out of a soulshard. The soulstone, when applied to someone, can be used by that person to self-resurrect. Now my understanding is that you can only make one every 30 minutes and they only last 30 minutes so it’s not like I can go around handing them out to people. But, the nice thing is that I can use it myself.

If you are not sure what a soulshard is, I’ll sum it up for you. Basically, a warlock casts a special spell on a monster just before it dies. If successful, you will capture the monster’s soul in a soulshard. Warlocks use these for various things, like summoning demons and people (or creating soulstones now).

I also learned a few new tricks (new to me anyway). I started using my voidwalker demon for pulling. I would send him in to gain aggro, and recall him. When the monster attacking him wandered into range for my attacks I would tell the voidwalker to start attacking again, and I would attack as well. Worked pretty well as the monsters kept their distance from me.

Another trick I learned was really nice for me. One of the things I hate is when a monster starts to run away when it gets low on health (not all monsters do this). Warlocks have curses they can cast on monsters. You can only have one curse on at a time. Normally, I use the “Curse of Agony” which is a damage-over-time curse. I noticed one of the other curses, “Curse of Recklessness”, has a side-feature of keeping monsters from fleeing. So, I started casting CoR at the end of the battle, just before the time when a monster might run. It was a great to not have to worry about a monster running away and pulling in more bad guys.

All and all an enjoyable evening.

– Ethic

[World of Warcraft] Since I last left you, I have been playing my warlock and having a good time. I’m up to level 17 now and swinging a mean sword while carrying around a bright glowing orange globe maraca-thingy. I summon a voidwalker (a blue bully from hell) who does a lot of the hard work for me.

Actually, most of the damage comes from my damage-over-time spells and some extreme burnination. My sword is mostly for looks and for the bonuses it gives me. I realized tonight that I have 8 talent points to spend so I put 5 into improved corruption to make that spell nice and fast casting. Not sure what to do with the other 3 points yet.

It feels downright evil to play a warlock with all the demon summoning and such. I’m not real happy about a few things, like soulshards not stacking and the fact that I lose my demon whenever I hearthstone or fly. Kind of sucks to have to waste a soulstone every time I want to take a wyvern somewhere.

Sooner or later I’ll be able to summon a succubus, which from the few times I have been around them will be annoying. I really hope they don’t still crack their whips and moan all the damn time. My wife will think I’m watching some sort of bondage porn video (not that there is anything wrong with that).

– Ethic

[World of Warcraft] I ended up playing my level 28 undead rogue on Hellscream for an hour or so tonight. Relocating to Thousand Needles from Tarren Mill (which killed the game for me) made a huge difference in getting things rolling again. Killed a lot of centaurs on the edge of their camp. Felt very rogue-ish. Getting close to level 29 now. That would make him the highest level I have ever gotten to in WoW. Sad.

Anyway, I had forgotten how fantastic and majestic the scenery in WoW is, at least to me. The Undercity and Orgrimmar are both just a lot of fun to look at.

It only took me about 30 minutes to remember how to play a rogue, it is not a simple class to play really, lots of options to play with. It feels good to be back, even though the lag on this server is still pretty rough at times. I’m awfully tempted to start a new character on a low population server, but I’m not sure I want to go through the low level stuff yet again. I have not played an Alliance character past level 18 (in beta) so there is at least some fresh quests on that side for me. We’ll see how aggravating the lag gets.

– Ethic

[World of Warcraft] It just keeps on going and keeps on growing.

IRVINE, California – August 29, 2005 – Blizzard Entertainment®, Inc. today announced that World of Warcraft®, its subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has reached more than one million paying customers in North America. This brings the total population for Blizzard’s critically acclaimed game, the largest MMORPG in the world, to more than four million paying customers.

It’s a behemoth now, steamrolling over rival MMOs like they are made of Dereth.

– Ethic

[World of Warcraft] I finally picked up WoW and will be installing it tomorrow when I get back to LA. I am completely unfamiliar with the game since I learned very little in the three hours I have under my belt (which I have mostly forgotten). I have heard reports of players waiting in long lines just to get on some servers.

Are there any suggestions for which server I should play on?

– Spot

So, you are away from your computer and you get an itch for a little World of Warcraft. Just can’t quite get enough of that game you say?

Well, your prayers have been answered. Yes, the WoW Trading Card Game is on it’s way. Finally, we can get a little more of that sweet, sweet WoW.

– Ethic