Your target is Dead

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 ;).

Haven’t played that much lately, just some dailies now and then and a few instance runs, but here’s a selection of nice screenshot taken over the past few months.

[Show as slideshow]

Unfortunately there will be some changes to the Season 4 Epic rewards as you can read here on wow-insider.

The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:

Shoulders: 2200
Weapon: 2050
Head: 1700
Chest: 1600
Legs: 1550
Gloves: none
Off-hand: none

This is bad news for everybody who doesn’t play with a cookie cutter setup, or who just isn’t very good as pvp. Teams below 1550 rating (the majority I would think) won’t get any rewards. This will probably change the Arena landscape, as I assume a lot of people will just not bother anymore with Arena. And this will leave the hardcore pvpers battling it out amongst themselves, and they might be struggling to get a decent rating.

Has Blizzard thought this through ? You would think so. I really wonder what the mindset it of the people that come up with this stuff…

Nice discussion on Tobold’s blog

Keep your esport out of battlegrounds

Mainly did dailies dailies and more dailies this week. Think I went a bit overboard as I didn’t feel like doing them at all the past few days. So today we just did the Auch. Crypts instance. The bosses gave me two more spirit shards. I had 15 in my bag, so I finally figured out where to exchange them. You can use those spirit shards at Gartok in Terrokar Forest. You only need 8 to obtain Swift Windfire Diamond, a Metagem to be used in your headgear socket. I am currently using it in Earthwarden’s coif and it’s a nice gear upgrade.

And with pain in my heart I had to let Jerry the wolf, my trustworthy companion from around lvl 28 - 60 go. I don’t see myself leveling a pet from 60 - 70, and I needed to open up a slot to learn the highest ranks of Bite and Gore. Got a very nice new dinosaur named Sparkles though. He holds aggro very well, and he was already tamed at lvl 69. I took him with me on all the dailies and he’s just turned 70 during the last instance run. I found him in the top north sphere in Netherstorm. If you have a pet spot open, I’d like to suggest you try one of them out. They look fun (wiggly tail and all) and do nice dmg as well.

And that makes my pet collection complete, got a cat, a ravager and the above mentioned dino now. I sure hope that once WOTLK arrived we get 2 more spots so we can train the new animals in Northrend. Otherwise I am going to have to let go of one of them and that won’t be fun.