So what happened next? Well I carried on playing wow another 6 months or so, getting my rankings up but eventually grew bored of constant dungeons, crap world pvp where the numbers were never even enough for a fun constant fight and boring arenas where your rankings would only go so high before you kept meeting the same group setups.

So I fell away, stopped logging on for days at a time.

Time passed by, haaz probably died a glorious death, wiping out hundreds of pussyboy order before being slain by a mighty champion god. Then he was reborn into another world, one where stupid shoulder guards hadn’t been invented, where the gnome technology was non-existent. He asked around, where am I?, why am I short with a hugh potbelly? Why do I keep wanting to fight till I die a great death? Why do elves dressed like porn stars kill me in 0.1 uberseconds?

Yes, I’m now on Warhammer Online.

This game is everything I need at the moment. I love the Warhammer world, been playing the tabletop games for 17 odd years now. The world PVP is key to the game being good and the classes are slightly more balanced than I remember the wow’s to be.

If you read this and playing too, say hi to Haaz or Haazgoth on Karak Norn.

Guild sinks as most predicted

So Warlords finally gave in and I was one of about 3 active players left. So I left. I do find it funny that most of the people that left joined guilds that have failed to turn out to be what was expected (i.e. 2 months later and still struggeling in karazhan) or are still running karazhan (those still in my friends lists never seem to be anywhere other than kara).

I can only assume they are happy.

So for a while I was guildless, which is kinda what I wanted so I could concentrate on my PVP (more later).

Now I am in a small but friendly guild called ‘The Pride’. We have only started karazhan this week, but that is not my target, it is having a fun guild to be a member of.

PVP

So me and Elliot have our own 2v2 team ‘Canibal Corpse’. Yeah I know theres a spelling mistake, its intentional. It was the name of our first guild on mazrigos.

We’ve done ok, still hovering around 1500 rating but in the last few weeks we’ve got quite a lot of PVP gear and recruited a druid (Mumrik) who has pushed our ratings even higher last week.

Warhammer

Not sure if I mentioned, but I have being playing warhammer for about 17 years now. I have a tournament coming up (tomorrow actually) so have also spent a big amount of time building up my army and painting it. I’ll post pictures here when they are done.

Tobold’s post earlier today pretty much covered the issues we’ve had.  An inner core rushed to 70 pretty quickly and started whizzing through the content. After a while it was pretty obvious it would be some time before we hit kara.

So our main tank and one of our priests (both officers) moved to a more serious raiding guild. They left as friends and we wish them the best of luck, but for about 4 days it looked like everything would blow apart and no one was sure who would leave.

Thankfully no one else has left and we have survived for now. So forgive me for not updating.

On a slightly different note, Elliot (my brother IRL) has dinged 70 too and now we start our 2v2 arena team.

I’ll be making sure I keep an eye on my theorycraft.

I actually hit 70 handing in the first of the 2 karazhan key chain quests.

But as you all know, hitting the end level is only the beginning. I now have the problem of missing most of the instances in favour of grinding/questing. This is mainly due to time. I have quite a few hours a night to play, but usually its interupted by the wife coming home, cooking dinner, doing things, and I find that if I instance in the evenings i’m always “guys gotta go AFK, my wifes just dropped something” or “brb, gotta do x y z”. So I tend to leave them alone.

Now I have to start on my keys to advance my Karazhan quest chain and my heroic keys.

But enough of that, I’m sure those subjects will fill more and more of my daily inputs here. Lets look at the last month.

Favourite bits

worst bits

Wow, this is a nice feature. Its only Beta at the moment so don’t expect it to be perfect. I also noticed its quite slow to load. The european index is here.

For those not had a chance to check it out yet, the armory is a new feature that blizzard have added to their website. You can search for any character/arena team/guild on any server. It bascially replicates the character profile you see when you play warcraft.

I personally have mixed issues with this. Its great that I can show people my character details and talent tree and equipment. Its also great that I can post the link here and never need to manually update it (unlike CT Profile). Also great is the fact it is a true representation of my characters with my true stats based on gems and socket bonus etc. CT Profile wasn’t quite upto speed on that.

However, as some blogs have already questioned, there is potential for this to be a bad idea too. Your guild (or guild you are applying too) can see every good and bad part of your character. Additionally, I can’t seem to work out when the snapshot is taken, so the equipment isn’t what I want to show. Ok so it Beta, but having some kind of snapshot button in game would be useful, so that when you are wearing your full DPS gear for example you hit the button and people see your true stats, and likewise for example your tanking gear (or whatever class you are).

However the most pressing problem in my mind is the skills page. I looked at haaz last night and noticed my dagger skill was quite low, along with some other skills. Now I’ve always tried to keep all my weapon skills up, but some are just hanging the wrong side of 200. Normally not a problem, but with loot distribution up in the air for a lot of guilds, would someone with a low skill in a type of weapon be allowed to roll on said weapon, say a dagger?

Before hand, you just rolled and started to use it and before long your skill was back into normal figures. However now your easy to access skill levels could influence the loot you can roll on.

Bit far fetched maybe? Possibly. What about proffessions. Your skill is 5 off what is required to use it, does that mean you can’t roll on it. Before hand your word would be taken and you’d soon skill up to use it.

I’m 99% sure this wont be a problem for Haaz as I’m in a pretty mature guild, but others may find it a problem.

For the time being however, its a pretty cool feature.

75% through 69

If it wasn’t for the house move (see below) I’d be dinging 70 tonight. But I am, so it’ll have to wait until sometime next week.

Last night I was in Netherstorm, trying to finish off as many solo quests as possible. Finishing that area off soon will mean that I can save most of shadowmoon valley and blades edge mountain quests for easy gold and rep when I’m not PVPing or raiding.

I finished off the bessy quest, where you escort a cow back to the farmer. I didn’t think it was the best use of my time, I should be killing things, but then even a cow needs a bit of loving care and attention now and again.

Also collected a mana bomb fragment, weaved some magic barriers to keep the ghoulies in and then went looking for trouble up near the stormspire. So far I only have a few minor issues with the expansion, and not being able to roll an Etheral warrior is one of them. Maybe in the next expansion please blizzard?

Also, I’ve put a page up showing the attunements chart for the expansion here. I’m hoping to tick off the bits I’ve finished, and although its more for my own tracking, it’ll let you keep up with what I’m doing.

Moving

Going to be moving house over the weekend, so wont be expecting to log on until at least tuesday night. So no updates here until then either.

A guildie has been having the same problem with finding enough recipies to level up and he suggested I get the honored with cenarion recipies, the adamantite weightstone and grinding stone. So flew over to swamprat post and headed south to the Cenerion stronghold. Picked up the 2 recipies and headed back to Shattrath to portal back to the undercity.

(By the way, if anyone reading this is levelling blacksmithing, please please please go to undercity not orgrimmar. The distance to anvil – AH – post box – anvil is so much shorter.)

So anyway, made it to the undercity auction house, bought enough mats to make 10 weightstones and off I went. Now this is where I’m hazy, but at some point halfway through they went green and now I have 156 blacksmithing skill. This is gonna take some time I tell ya.

Made an arcanite rod and a fel iron rod for my brothers priest and then waited for the hearthstone to be ready to take me back to the outlands.

So now all I got to do is wait to go test it out. A bit sad they couldn’t get the snare breaking with charge and intercept but apparently it requires a rejig of the mechanics.

I’ll keep you upto date on how this affects Haaz.

I noticed that it took longer, I suppose its got more files to overwrite.

Anyway, I hope I never have to write about this subject again. Anyone reading it must be well and truly bored of it by now.

So today I entered the fray, and conscious that Haaz has been pretty slack in dealing damage to the enemies of the horde, he immediately set out to take out some high profile bounty.

Oh no I gotta instal Burning Crusade somewhere in there.

Broken record anyone?

If anyone does come to this post and thinks wtf is this guy on, I need help not a flippin update on his real life issues, well I have one bit of advice. Copy the contents off all your 4 (or 5) disks into a folder called “wow cds”. Start at number 1 and go to number 4 or 5 depending how many you have. If it asks you if you want to overwrite click yes. Then when you are done hit the installer icon. It does it faster, trust me.

Anyway back to my mind numbing issues.

I was kinda wondering why the Burning Crusade disks just didn’t contain all the patch info upto 2.0.0? There probably is a really good reason, like making someone have original disks. But wouldn’t they need the original disks to upgrade to world of warcraft?

So many questions and so little answers. Who has these answers. Write into “haaz wanna know, c/o orgrimmar inn, orgrimmar”. I don’t think orgrimmar needs a postal code.

WOW, I am 50% through since I wrote all this. Maybe if I keep writing crap the install time will speed up. And if it doesn’t, it’ll numb the pain of American Idol my wife is intend on keeping up with.

Only one grumble though, why does my install only wait until I’m level 68 with full rested bonus to play up? Sucks. I hate warcraft, I’m never gonna play it again.

Yeah right.

So the challenge has been set and here are the results…..

Gnome Warlock Gnomes are strange little things. Fascinated with gadgets and shiny things, gnomes are often plotting and planning – but are pretty smart, despite all the explosions.You’re a creepy, creepy warlock. You delight in the darker things in life – such as setting people on fire, and delight in the macabre. You’d probably fake your own death just to freak people out by getting up from the casket at your funeral. Find out your real-life WoW race and class at QuizGalaxy.com

YOU WHAT?!?!

Actually, after spilling my drink I sat down and thought about it.

I am rather small at 5’3″. I’m an engineer by trade, so blowing things up is a speciality. Plus I only really play as undead, so I suppose a warlock is the closest you can get to pure evil.