Your target is Dead

The NDA was lifted yesterday and beta reviews are popping up all over the place. I have preordered the game, even though I am still not sure I am interested in playing yet another leveling up game. Also from what I have seen from the gameplay videos, combat appears to be a bit slow. And the graphics aren’t very impressive, though the last batch of videos look a lot better than what we have seen before.

But this guide makes me really want to play the game : Warhammer Casual Player Guide.

The game sounds like a lot of fun, and you can jump play for an hour, jump in do some pvp, a scenario a few quests or whatever and even gain some xp or just enjoy yourself :). So I am now really looking forward to the release of WAR.

Our Warcraft guild will try to start one as well on one of the european servers, so in case you’re looking for a casual guild with friendly players, check out the Sabre Unleashed’s website.

Reading the latest info about WOTLK on wowinsider, it looks hunters and their pets will see quite a few changes. The talent trees will be different, as in that the Beastmaster now really will be a ‘beastmaster‘ who’s pet will have extra abilities etc.

And different pets will have different abilities based on their ‘pet familiy‘. Not sure how I feel about that, my hunter has two nice lvl 70 pets, and I certainly don’t feel much like leveling another one up. I hope Northend will have a few new nice pets, and that we will get an extra slot for one of the new pets, so I don’t have to abandon one !

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/07/21/hunter-pets-to-have-family-skills/

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/07/24/clarification-on-pet-talents/

WOTLK Pets on Petopia

Yesterday it was the USA’s turn, now Europe will get patch 2.4.3. The biggest change is ofcourse the mount, now at lvl 30. I have no more characters in that range so it won’t benefit me. Nor do I plan to ever start a new one again to be honest. Been through that several times now… But I guess it’s a small incentive to level up an extra character. Already the forum whines of people that want their lvl 40 mount money back (the cost has been reduced to 35g) :).

More info on WowInsider: http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/07/15/patch-2-4-3-is-going-live/

News Article on Massively

Season 4 kicked off today here in Europe. The hall of legends was packed with customers, anxious to spend their hard earned honour ! As I haven’t played much lately, I didn’t buy a whole lot, because I didn’t have my honour maxed out. But I got new shoulders for Morphea with the pvp gems and the Aldor +attack power enchant (the cheap one, I am only honoured with them). Would have also liked to get a new belt, but i was 1000hnr short…

One big complaint on the new shoulders: They make me look like a Xmas Tree :(. They are way too big on a female orc, and they have some sort of weird lightning effect that gets a bit annoying after a while.

Morph already has quite a few Season 3 items, and no Arena points saved. I stopped playing Arena quite some time ago. After liking it for some time, I got frustrated loosing all the time, as it seems we got to play against better and better geared people, and basically I pretty much suck at Arena as well. Anyway, only got the new Merciless Staff for Morph, which is only a few points better than the previous one.

A new patch is coming soon. Highlights : A mount for you alt at lvl 30, and new bags. For 1200Gold you can buy a 22slot bag at an npc named Harris Pilton ;). The idea behind this is probably just to introduce a new money sink and try to get people to play a bit longer by letting them grind dailies for a few more gold for these bags.

Link roundup:

Tobold’s thoughts on the new patch

WowInsider: Patchnotes , Having Fun Again and All of that just for a hat.

It had been quite a while since some of us did a guild run in an instance. Some people are exploring other games. Some only log on a bit to do some dailies (like me), and it’s almost summer now, so people tend to spend more time away from the computer. But this sunday we had enough online to go into the Caverns of Time again. A bit of an odd group, with two druids (a tree and a feral one), pally, hunter and a rogue. It’s always so much fun to fight next to Thrall in Escape from Durnhold. It was a very clean run. Only Spikee my pet bit the dust once, when he tried to tank three mobs ;).

Afterwards we went into the Black Morass and managed to help Medivh open the portal. There was only one death, but battlerez came to the rescue. Just like the last time I was in there, Morphea and Spikee were supposed to take care of the adds that spawn from each portal. We did a decent job, though every now and then some mob managed to slip through, but nothing that couldn`t be fix afterwards. I was lucky to get a new chest piece, with three sockets off Temporus, one of the boss dragons.

After all the portal stuff, the final boss fight with the huge dragon almost seemed too easy ;). It was nice to do some group stuff again, especially in the best instance Blizzard has created so far. If only they released something like this more regularly :(.

Wow insider has a weekly roundup of their most interesting articles. There is ofcourse some WOTLK news as well ;). You can find it at http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/06/03/wow-insider-weekly/.

Haven’t played a lot myself lately, just a few dailies and now and then the daily pvp, the wait for WOTLK is a long one !

Yesterday two guildmembers level 68 wanted to do this quest. As it turned out, it’s more of an event. Never done it before, weird enough, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. Our group makeup with shaman, pally, mage, rogue and mage was a bit odd, but we made it work with some help from a few folks who were also doing this event.

Basically you have to defeat five bosses in a row, especially the last one hits hard and once you think you’re done, he revives himself ;). And the rewards are great. As a non-70 you get a lot of xp and pots and bandages, plus a nice weapon at the end. As I did this with my 70 hunter, I got over 22g per quest, so the epic flyer got just a little bit closer.

More info can be found on the wowwiki and wowhead:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Ring_of_blood

Chain starts with Brokentoe.

Wow Insider has a nice round up of this week’s latest news and interesting views at

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/05/20/the-tuesday-morning-post/

Quite a bit of WOTLK news and specifically Deathknight news / speculation ;).

Wrath of the Lich King 10 Minutes Trailer from Boubouille on Vimeo.

Not all that impressive to be honest. A lot of reused textures and models. Also I think the graphical engine is starting to look it’s age. It’s 4 - 5 years old by now and it’s showing.

Why is it taking two years to release this expansion ? It’s way too long as the current content is getting long in the tooth. The 2.4 patch was nice for a month or so, but does Blizz expect people to be running dailies till late this year ? Ofcourse an instance run with the guild every now and then is fun, but that’s about it at the moment…