Netherstorm: Biodome!

I was pretty excited when we finally hit the Eco-Sphere. It was spectacular and gorgeous and the contrast between the lusciousness of the bio-garden extravaganza from the harsh crackling barren outer area made it even more intriguing. Inside the Eco-Sphere, you gather flowers, collect pelts from lynxs, and hunt down crocs. It was a nice retreat from the rest of Netherstorm.
We also thought this NPC was pretty funny. If you guys can remember the movie Biodome, Paully Shore was one of the main actors. hehehe. Good to see the sense of humor persisting.

Having a druid in your party is pretty awesome. Taint uses his flight form to do a ton of scouting for us which helps speed up the questing x10. He finds collection items, rare spawned mobs, and tracks horde. hehehe.
Yeah, these horde decided to gank us while we were fighting mobs. We were a little dissoriented and made the huge mistake of not targeting the Shammy first. He actually went down from Felix's DOTs but he ankhed right away. So we ran back to our bodies, Taint took to the skies, located them, and we gave them a little payback. Twice. :)
So as of tonight, I have 465,677XP left till 70. Felix might come up to Austin this Friday so we can all hit 70 here and then go out and celebrate. Mexican Martinis on the house!
Please send all your gold to Alachia so she can just buy her epic flying mount. hehehe.. I wish. I've decided I want the epic flying mount and want to skip the regular to save money. But who knows how that'll go. Must figure out a way to make a quick 6.5k.

....

Window Shopping

So Sadin sent out this link to us and I have to admit I was admiring the goods. I will probably never complete a SET but holy WOW, I'd look pretty damn good in most of these outfits!

Burning Crusade Armor Sets

I noticed that all of the priest sets had two versions, Raiment (healing) and Regalia (spell damage).

Priest Dungeon 3 Set Hallowed


Priest Tier 4 Incarnate


Priest Tier 5 Avatar


Priest Gladiator Investiture


My favorite, oddly enough, is the Hallowed Dungeon 3 set. Aesthetics I mean, not stats. I can't wait to see what a party of Tier 5 peeps could do. 5 man Nax? hehe. But I don't plan on getting too caught up in the Tier sets. We'll definitely go after the 10 man instance epics for sure but will probably wait awhile for the 25 man. I heard attunement on a lot of these 70 man raiding dungeons is a nightmare.

Mother F#$@! Taser!

The First shot is pretty impressive isn't it!? I was like woah! An eco-sphere! They really made the most out of the "off-world" theme. So Netherstorm! I came, I saw, I admired, I got bugged out. LOL. We spent the ENTIRE night trying to do the quest Nexus-King Salhadaar for the Ameer's Impulse Taser. The last boss continually bugged out over and over and over again. You basically have to do a series of 5 quests that lead up to the end boss.

Step 1. The Ethereum. Kill Lots of Shit (easy)
Step 2. Ethereum Data. Find some data box (even easier)
Step 3. Potential for Brain Damage = High. Kill More of the same mobs and gather an essence. Use the essence to see invisible mobs. Kill THOSE mobs to collect relay data. Out of all of us, Felix had the easiest time. He'd use the essence, dot all the mobs around him up until the essence timer faded. The DOTs persisted even though he was out of the essence and the mobs would die. He'd then use the essence again and collect the relay data off the dead mobs. Brilliant. Nurf locks. :) (annoying)
Step 4. S-A-B-O-T-A-G-E. Get a ethereum wrapping off of a mob.(easy)
Step 5. Delivering the Message. Escort some mummy to a conduit and then destroy it. (easy)
Step 6. Nexus-King Salhadaar. Break down the three conduits around Salhadaar and kill him and the two elite ads he spawns. (should be easy enough with a five man group unless it's BUGGED TO HELL)

Yeah, we'd break down the conduits and he'd just stand there and follow people around. I was like cool, like my new non-combat pet? So we just slaughtered mobs around the area while waiting for him to despawn and respawn.

Towards 1am, we were finally able to find the right combination as to not bug him out. We had Sadin break all the conduits, saving the last one to break in the area closest to edge of the world. It took all of us dying, but we completed the bloody quest! I got my taser!

If it weren't for that quest, we'd all probalby be like 69 and a quarter. Instead, I'm still two bubbles away from 69. :( OH well, we were ahead of schedule anyhow. Good luck to all those who attempt this guy in the next few days.

We parked ourselves in Area 52 for the night. It has a bank! yeah! We'll resume our normal questing schedule tomorrow. :)

Blade's Edge

You start to get to the good part of Blade's Edge Mountain when you come across R3DO which by the way is subtle but funny. At this point, it's pretty apparent that the terrain is a little more complex than most zones. It is a "mountain" after all, so there's a lot of ramping up to zones and ramping down. We thought this might be a pretty big pain in the arse but because of the flying machine, it was pretty easy. Just be sure to set your hearthstone to Toshley's inn. From there, you can get to most of the major zones by being zapped in the machine. :D

When we first zoned into Blade's Edge, I heard a couple of the guys talk about how they hoped this wasn't just another desolace or badlands. I was kind of anxious myself having just quested through areas like Zanger and Nagrand. I was afraid that this zone would end up as the "not so interesting zone".... far from it.


These Station Agents were funny. They look so serious.


And even if the zone isn't that visually interesting for you as Nagrand might have been, the quests more than make up for it. We all got to turn ourselves into Draenei for awhile with an Overseer Disguise for a quest to talk to some Draenei. You collect costume scraps (5) and can make them. We had fun /dancing and Taint was able to retain the Draenei form while in flying form. So he looked like a flying Draenei. Try it out if you have a level 68 druid. It's pretty funny. I called him Mary Poppins. He called himself Neo. lol!

Sometimes I wish I had time to read the lore or even half of the quests. We see things as we're steam rolling through everything and it makes me wonder about the intention of things.....like as we were looking up over a land form bridge, there was a dragon head hanging from it...kind of like onyxia and nef in stormwind. Then as I was flying out of Blade's Edge, I noticed all these dragons on the mountain spike edges. Like the landform was meant to keep enemy dragons from invading the area. I'm positive there's an explanation for it all but no time except to just speculate...which is okay in my book as well. We make up some pretty wild stories for things on our own.

We finished the Blade's Edge zone last night and now we move onto Netherstorm. I have absolutely no idea what it's like but I can't wait to see it. Tonight we're doing a quest line that ends with Nexus-King Salhadaar which will yeild me this lovely Ameer's Impulse Taser. Yummy! I wonder if it really acts like a taser. :D

/Extension?

StreetChief said...
boo turquoise. as you stated before. sooo when are we gonna hear this new podcast by chance.

/extension?

lol. Being part of a static party has its setbacks. One of them is dedication to a static schedule and a static goal. In my case, we all want to hit 70 by this Friday. With any luck, we'll hit 69 or very close to it tonight. Then we can all go and do our own thing for awhile. Hitting 70 isn't just about hitting 70 in our case. It's about getting to a level cap, grabbing the flying mount, and then farming up mats to make tons of money for the epic flying mount. hahahaah... No, actually each of us have our own goals post 70. Taint wants to raid, Sadin wants to catch up on movies, Felix wants to farm and memorize all the quests from 60-70, and I want to explore.

Without getting too personal, my life will be seeing some serious changes in the near future. Starting mid February, I plan on kicking up the podcast production and have about 5 shows already outlined. I kind of knew January was going to be hard in terms of production but I hope to start editing Episode 24 content this weekend.

Okay, now go bug Sam. He's been sitting on the New Years show for 3 weeks!

Blade's Edge of Reason

As soon as I hit Toshley's Station in Blade's Edge Mountain, I knew we were going to have some fun. There were a couple of quests that I thought were super creative and hella fun. It's this gnome-run alliance town with cool gidgets and gadgets and crazy machines everywhere.
Test Flight was the first one we attempted. You speak to this guy and he has you test out his flying machine. Next thing you know, you're zapped into his machine and thrown into the air! He has you do this several times after the initial test but you have to sign Tally's Waiver before he has the machine take you to different parts of Blade's Edge.
We flew all over the place and once you get the hang of where the places are, you use them like a free flight to quest zones. At one point, there was an additional quest you get from one town to take the flying machine and use this turning top which spins you while you're flying.
Ride the Lightning was another one of my favorite quests here because you use this Repolarized Magneto Sphere to create a bubble around you and you absorb lightning strikes from Scalewing Serpents. We felt like we were bouncing in giant bubbles. After a few seconds though, we realized Taint could root one and get all the lightning strikes from one serpent while we started to gather the rest of the quest! Fun with Efficiency. :D
As you can see, mine is the dark shadowy bubble. Everyone else's was a bright turqoise.

Epic "Looking"

I'm impressed. The mobs are far more epic "looking" in The Burning Crusade. Some of them look like they're going to mangle you just by looking at you. However, we've found they've got more bark than bite. The mobs you summon for quests end up being pretty weak actually in regards to attack power and HP. The only mob we encountered so far that gave us a run for our money was the snot guy, Durn The Hungerer. We were four-manning him and had him to 7% health when a group of horde working in cahoots with an a-hole alliance guild ganked us. Needless to say, it landed the first person to ever hit my /ignore list. Suprisingly, I have never /ignored anyone before.

Above is a picture of me flying on a Nether Drake for a quest called Surveying the Land in Nagrand. All you do is hop on it and he rides you in a loop around. We call this the "Blizzard's Artistic Director's Show&Tell". hehe. As we all landed one by one, the screen clears everything from the area so you can't see other characters or the NPC or any mobs. So as we each landed, we were heartily ganked by two frost mages. hehehe. Bastards.

Above is an image of us burning bodies in Terokkar. Spiffy aye? So much intrigue in The Burning Crusade. I wish I had more time tonight, I'd post our adventures in Blade's Edge Mountains. We finally completed all of Nagrand and moved on to Blade's Edge. I thought I was going to hate the area so much because at first it looked so desloate...but just wait till you see it. It's trippy as all hell and the quests are hella fun and easy.
We also hit 68 tonight and Taint got flight form. Within the first 15 minutes, he was practicing free falling into Bear Form and landing on unsuspecting horde. Oh, and I made him test it out and apparently you can land on those floating islands in Nagrand! Woot!

Hilarious Oddities

Here are some pretty funny things I came across in my adventures last night. How funny. Haris Pilton's Pet. lol! We keep coming across stuff like this which indicates that there must have been some pretty goofy nights at the Blizzard development headquarters... I have to figure out how to get the steamy romance novel to add to my collection. Awhile back, Boozefort started sending me some pretty random items like the IWIN button and A Pretty Rock, etc. When I have some free time in the future,I'm going to display my random collection. World of Warcraft Bizzare and Useless but Funny Items! Interestingly, I'll probably end up vendoring all my old epic items but I'll end up keeping the unique grey items. :)

A Bag for Everything

The other day when we hit the Allerian Stronghold in Terokkar Forest, I discovered Mr. Fabian Lanzonelli, the General Goods & Bag vendor. I spent forever looking at his wares. He has 20 slot bags for just about every profession. Mining Sack, Enchanter's Satchel, Gem Pouch, Heavy Toolbox but the prices were a little out of hand in my opinion so I opted to not get one. When I bring my rogue up though to level 70, I might have to invest in the Heavy Toolbox for my engineering supplies because those do get out of hand. Does anyone know if tailors can make those? I know my mage can make the enchanter's and herbalist 20 slot bag for a lot less than 14-20g.

---okay..just did some more thottbotting and see that you have to gain honored Rep with a few factions to get the tailoring recipes for equivalent bags. Hmmmm, time to make friends with high level tailors :)

Terokkar

We almost missed this zone for some reason. We were so busy moving onto Nagrand that we didn't realize there a million more quests in Terokkar to do first. Quite a bit of collection quests but completely worth doing. We gained an entire level in one night just by burning through the Terokkar quests. The entire zone was like being in a Dark Crystal movie with strange bird men, glowing moth creatures, and gigantic spiders.
I must say though, the game developers certainly have a much darker tone in The Burning Crusade Expansion. Many of the quests are pretty disturbing if you think about them. There was this one quest we had to rescue children out of cages. Apparently the birdmen wanted to eat them. :) Something straight of Blair Witch or Hansel and Gretel. lol. Also, there have been serveral quests before this that we did where had to burn bodies to give them a proper burial. Burn bodies? And right before we left Terokkar, we had quest called Crakin' Some Skulls where you had to go around and go retrieve some debts from people....basically, you murdered people and collected money off their dead corpse....Hehehe. There was something similar to this in STV where you punished the debtors by taking off their feet and thumbs. Morbid. :D
I found this kick ass skunk in Terokkar as we were doing a quest to diguise ourselves as orcs. Don't we all look pretty hideous? I followed the skunk around for awhile to try and see if he sprayed you. He doesn't. I find these attention to details in the game make it more immersive. If you pay close enough attention, you can spot animals in the forest fighting each other to the death. Pretty soon, we'll all be standing around two cocks in a pen going at it, betting 100g a fight. :P
Something we discovered Friday night was a quest called Ring of Blood. It's at the AT arena in Nagrand near Laughing Skull Ruins. It's a 6 part quest that ends totalling in 11.5g and 14500xp, plus tons of health and mana pots. The quest rewards were sick! I got the Battle Mage's Baton. If you check out the stats, it's pretty damn equivalent to Staff of Shadow Flame which you get in Black Wing Layer off of Nefarian (end boss). Taint got his druid the Staff of Beasts and Sadin got his warrior the Honed Voidaxe....weird to think Ashkandi's would one day be vendor trash. :(
So Yes, thanks to The Burning Crusade, two weeks after you hit level 60, you can find yourself wearing and carrying things you would have had to raid 5 months for. It's exciting and not only that, but everytime you think you got something amazing or truly epic for your level, the next quest reward pops up...and it's OMG, that kicks even more arse! We were totally shocked when were checking our stats. Taint has over 11,000HP with party buffs in bear form. Felix and I have over 16% crit chance with our dps gear on! Back in my days as the mage, I had about 3% crit chance with Tier 1 and Tier 2 gear on.
But that's not to say we're obsessing over loot yet...just shocked and amazed and enjoying it for the time being. I'm just so glad to be grinding XP in new content. I'll keep saying it over and over again, the artistic direction of TBC is soooo to my taste. I keep wanting to just stop and look around and stare at different features. Of course, pausing isn't really compatible with our play style, we simply move too fast. When I try to take screenshots, I always lose the group and then I hear over vent "Where's Alachia? What are you doing!?" hehehe. OH well... next character will be for the gawking and admiring. :) WE don't play WoW for the content, we play it for the XP grind right? lol! okay...joking. Seriously, even if you are mechanically grinding out the xp, don't forget to look up...it's pretty amazing. You might find a vortex. When I hit 70, I'm going to try and fly to those floating islands. :D 3 more levels to go!

One of our own hits 70

^---Sang on His Flying Mount---^
There are now over 50 people on our server who are level 70. And now one of them is a <jae> member. Sang, NE Hunter, hit 70 this evening. And as promised, he did a fly-by for me and I got to see his flying mount. His landing was superb. Apparently, they go pretty slow but if you count the fact that you can avoid agro and can take a direct path, it's faster..

I really can't wait to get one. I get more excited all the time and I don't know why. The ability to fly at my own will...to land in places that hardly anyone else can get to...that just seems very cool to me.
As for the money to purchase one, Sang said by the time he reached 70, he had made over 1100g from just selling greens and stuff. So not to worry much about the flying mount. However, the EPIC flying mount....man, whose got money for that?

<--it's a bird! it's a plane! no, it's sang!

gratz kiddo!

WoW Days Blurred

I just realized today is Friday. WoW. It's kind of like an elevated high when you're a worker drone when you realize that you've finally reached the end of another week. It's even more exciting when you didn't realize it was Friday.

So I guess my weekend is finally here! We're making a push to 68....it may or may not be possible depending on how many horde fly-bys we get. I can't wait to get my flying mount and free fall to a levitate....then dot, silence, mind blast, land on top of them, mindflay.....I will most definitley have to Frapps that moment. Of course, I'll have to record all the bloopers of me falling to my death too. :D

Nagrand

The pic above is currently set to my desktop wall paper. Such a gorgeous place at night. It's a bit odd saying something like that. But I suppose that's part of truly living life in the metaverse.
This past weekend, after my group logged out around 2am, I spent a good two hours roaming around and exploring while leveling my herbalism to 375. I discovered the rest of Zangarmarsh and then headed down to Nagrand and spent a good time there riding around on my white stead and checking out all of the new creatures in the game. At the time, I was a bit too low in levels for Nagrand, so I agroed everything but it didn't stop me from trying to get as close as I could to the roaming Bullelks. :D
The sky at night is so breathtaking. You look up and its much like the Outlands only far more subtle and soft. Planets, stars, dust clouds hovering over the sky.. Kudos to the art director on this area. The floating shards of lands with water overflowing off into oblivion, super nice touch. If Zangar wasn't for you, Nagrand is something out of an epic anime movie. Oh, And I did hit 375 herbalism that night.

Where Have All the Alliance/Horde gone?

I've been monitoring the census of my server for some time now. When we first started on Boulderfist, the population was about 60% Alliance, 40% Horde. Last month, it was 58% Horde, 42% Alliance. After The Burning Crusade release, it is now 63% Horde, 37% Alliance. A complete flip from when the server first opened. That's a 1:7 ratio.

But I also checked to see wht top guilds are left on our server. Almost all of the top PVP raiding and PVE raiding guilds no longer exist on Boulderfist. If you've seen something similar on your server, there's actually a reason for this.

The growing trend before the TBC release was for all of the hardcore PVP raiding and PVE raiding guilds to transfer their characters to a low population/new server. This allows them a serious, serious advantage to continue with their pvp and pve raiding goals.

You see, in new servers and low pop servers, it's like candy for these guilds. They own it. They have little to no one to compete with for quests and can xp grind themsevles to 70 with limited competition. At least that's what I've heard as testimonial from people who are actually in guilds doing it. Those guys are probably already running Karahzan (10 man) and Black Temple(25 man) and all the other level 70 instances. :D

If you're curious about your realms census: here's a good site http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

My favorite part is to watch the level distribution change over time and to see which classes remain the most popular.

...

Land of the Winds

I finally found something more annoying than collection quests. Collection quests under water! lol! But we finally finished off Zangarmarsh and headed to Nagrand, orcish for "Land of the Winds" tonight.

I definitely liked the openness of it and the sky at night is gorgeous. There were very few areas to quest in the old world that felt as open as Nagrand.
It's also pretty nice because of the herd of animals roaming around. The developers who were working on Nagrand definitely have a great sense of humor. They had this elite giant walking around and at first, he's pretty intimidating but then upon close inspection, you notice he has snot hanging off his nose. lol.

And to address the angry reply left on my blog response about gankage. We had an entire guild ganking us in Nagrand. Level 69 warriors and priest and warlocks. They ganked us over and over and over again. But you know what, we just got right back up, rezzed, and kept questing and destroying horde along the way as well. I'm really really sorry that my story about gankage offended you so much. But that's what playing on a PvP server is all about. It's about having that dynamic of real life human player vs. real life human player interaction. You don't know when that rogue is going to try and one shot you. You don't know when that group of bored-off-their-assess horde guild is going to come charging down the road and do everything in their power to stop you from finishing any of your quest or even turning in your quests. I'm sorry but it's a two-way street. My hope is that you play on a PvE server so that you never ever have to experience any frustrations that comes from playing with people like me and the thousands of other who play like me with the same mentality as me. Please don't reprimand me for playing the game the way I like it and the way I enjoy it. I don't tell other people how to play this game and I'd hope you'd respect that I get to make my own out of this as well. But nonetheless, I suspect it is a given. I guess I'm not as gracious as you are. I do revel in my horde kills. Especially the ones provoked and that lead into great epic world pVp battles. I like the unpredictability of the unscripted contested territory play. So yeah, maybe it'll bring a smile to your face knowing that I was ganked repeatedly by horde 5 levels higher than me tongiht.

In fact, I actually was laughing about it later that night. I was telling the guild how surreal it is to be ganked and ganked by horde out in Nagrand and Zanger during the evening and at night when you're winding down, you're standing next to the same horde in the INN or Bank in Shattrath. It's really really trippy.

On a LIGHTER note, we got around to this hilarious collection quest. You collect dung off the ground. Seriously! We had a blast with this one. "So, you get enough sh1t?" "This quest is sh1tty" "You're full of sh1t" "How much sh1t do you have?" "Felix has all his sh1t together"....etc..hahaha..... Sadin was like, "I bet the developers are watching us right now going "hahahaha..look at these people picking up sh1t off the ground"... cruel humor.
/Sigh. I guess that Warlock I met was right. It really was WTFWed.

<--this is what you collect from the dung piles to turn in.

Two bubbles from 65. Sang, one of our guild members is 69. I told him that he's going to have to fly down and meet us when he gets his flying mount so I can see it. He was like "yeah, definitely, but I hope they teach you how to land!" :) Much more to look forward to...