PvP-ers are the real hard-core

I've always been a raider and I've almost never done PvP. So it should come as no surprise that while I have always thought of the serious raiders as hard-core, I've never thought much about PvP players as hard-core.

But you can't play WoW seriously (meaning track blogs and forums as well as learn everything you can about the game) without getting to see a bit of the culture of the PvP crowd, even if you don't do it yourself. So over time, I slowely realized that the PvP crowd are not only just as serious as the raiders when it comes to playing to the max, they also have a very tight sub-culture inside WoW. Serious raiders know bosses and tactics, use raid-specifc mods and view takedown movies by famous raiding guilds such as Nihilum. Apparently, PvP-ers are just as serious about names and tactics of top-rated PvP players, PvP mods and, of course, movies ;)

So over time I've grown to appreciate that PvP is a whole sub-game within WoW that I don't know. But I guess somewhere I was still under the impression that the really serious raiders play more, invest more and put more effort into their game, compared to the PvP people. This has changed today.

It changed because I stumbled onto a new blog (well new for me) from a druid called "The Ooglar". The top post was about a move to a new server and.. well, you can read it yourself. The point is, this guy is serious about PvPing. So serious, he up and moved to a new server to play with a warrior he calls "the best in the world". And that warrior was willing to plunk down gems, gold (huge amounts of gold) and to go roll a level 1 alt to another server just so he could convince this particular druid to join him. He didn't just try to convince - he talked to him for over 3 hours!
These guys are serious hard-core players. Sure, serious raiders will spend tons of time and gold maxing themselves to get the next boss down, but so do these guys, and I've never heard of a raid leader going after a specific player with such dedication. Maybe it's not required for raiding, but still - the dedication is there. So hats off to the PvP crowd, you have me convinced. PvP is hard-core :)

As a side not, Supersolid is now level 66 and I'm starting to think about what to do with him when I get to 70. The sad truth is, I don't see any raiding in my future, at least for a while, due to RL. So I'm thinking, as I'm sure many have thought before, maybe it's time to turn to PvP for a source of good epics... stay tuned... :)

Wowhead item links as tooltips

Apparently, it is as easy as adding:

<script src="http://www.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js"></script>

To your page, after which all wowhead links, such as Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix show a tooltip when moused-over.

Now how cool is that? :)
(kudos to wowinsider where I read about this :))

Zul'Aman

Patch 2.3 introduced many interesting things for my mage, so last evening when I had a chance to login early I took it and instead of logging in to my hunter (who is very close to 64 :)) I decided to let him rest, while I sample the new 2.3 content with my mage.
Then, while I'm doing a daily quest, out of the blue, I get a whisper from one of the raid leaders organizing the two Zul'Aman groups, asking me if I want to join. Do I ever! I thought I'd get to see Zul'Aman maybe in a couple of months, certainly not now. Luckily for me, my wife's sister was staying with us for the night and helping my wife with the baby, and this left me free to raid!

So after getting summoned to Zul'Aman and taking the flight-point and the quest from the guy outside, we went in. I was the only mage but thanks to the new Manna Biscuits I had no trouble feeding and watering all 10 of us :)
The only problem was, the spell uses the same reagent as Arcane Brilliance and needs 2 of them, so as the only mage, I was running very low by the time the raid was over. Note to self, bring more of that powder...

Anyway, trash was not hard, we had me to sheep and a Shadow Priest to MC, a hunter to freeze and of course fear from several classes. I think we wiped only once on trash.

The Bear Boss went down for us in one try which was awesome. The other group had a strange problem where the adds before the boss kept respawning in waves, probably a bug. We just had 1 group per ramp on the way to the boss and the fight itself was pretty much an endurance fight, for both healers and mages/locks. I think actually that this was pretty much true for all the boss fights in ZA that we did (three), they were all pretty long fights, certainly much longer than any of the fights in e.g. ZG (for comparison), except Hakkar.

Eagle boss gave us a few wipes due to us mis-understanding the tactic, people were not running in time to the storm target, but finally we got it right.

I think the longest fight was the Lynx Boss. He has only a 600k health, but you need to "kill" him again and again - once at 75%, once at 50% and again at 25%, plus the "real" health pool he has (so 4x600k). Each time, he resets to 100% health and a spirit lynx appears which you need to OT. After you DPS him down to zero, he resets back to the health he had just before the spirit lynx stage (e.g. 74%) and you need to continue DPS-ing him down to the next stage. All the while, you need to kill totems that he casts ASAP or they wipe the raid, AND he's wailing away on 2 (one is not enough) tanks, doing massive damage to them.
I spent most of the last fight (when we got him down) face down, after a totem decided it didn't like me and 2-shotted me, but the other 9 were able to carry on and win the fight.

There were some very nice touches in ZA, like frogs that you un-hex with sticks from mobs, they turn into people that either give you gifts or are vendors - we had a reagent vendor (no mage reagents alas), a food vendor (I bought over 20 of +23 spell damage food from him and 5 of the +30 sta food that I gave to our MT) and a vendor that sold in limited supply super health and mana pots - sweet! Even better, if you go straight from the entrance and after the river with the small pyramid in the middle turn right into some hut and kill all the mobs there, an NPC troll will suddednly thank you for saving him and turn into a vendor that repairs armor - way cool! :)

Overall I'd rate ZA a 9/10. Fun instance, good boss fights, hard but doable for a guild that has Kara on farm, with special touches that really make the instance stand out. Even if you don't get any loot from bosses, you get Heroic Badges, so no one comes out empty handed.

Thumbs up Blizzard :)

New blogroll added

The new blogroll is ready and working.
To create it, I first followed the procedure outlined at:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/blogroll-powered-by-google-reader.html

Summary: Add Google Reader feeds to the blogs you read, bunch them under folders (tags), make the folders public, use the code generation box at the above site.

One I had the code for each folder (Druid Links, Hunter Links, etc.) I created a new HTML/Javascript element here and added them all, one after the other, with:

<span style="font-weight: bold;">Name</span>


Added in front of each section. Simple :)
I stole the idea for this (and the <span> line) from Altitis - thanks mate!

The one thing that bothers me is that the code for each section is almost the same, with just an id number and the link to the Reader folder being different. I wish I knew enough Javascript to change the code so that can be reduced to just calling a function taking those 2 things as arguments - hmm maybe I'll have to learn Javascript now...

Hunter advances, blogroll removed (for now)

I've temporarily removed the Blogroll section - there's a new "automatic" way of creating/updating it by using Google Reader but I still have a minor kink to work out before I start using it.

Supersolid is advancing at a (for me) amazing rate, he's now 61 (and a half :)) and going strong. The gear I'm getting from Qutlands' quests and the first instance (Ramparts) is really a major step up compared to what I had before. Of course I was expecting this but still, I'm really astounded about how good the gear is compared to what I got from the "old world".

In fact the gear is so good, and I'm doing so well against mobs, that I've allowed myself to take a 2H weapon that looks amazing but has stats that are not as good for me - Hellreaver. Awesome looks :) This baby looks so good I think I'll keep it for walking around town even when I have better weapons that I will use when questing - right now I have a green axe that's decent but the difference in AP isn't so big so usually I don't even bother equipping it.

Really it's amazing what I can do as a BM hunter, e.g. kill 3 mobs at a time or 5 mobs (even 6) one after the other - happens when there are a lot of mobs and I pull others by mistake while killing the current one. At level 60 I soloed Drillmaster Zurok and unlike the others that commented on wowhead I barely needed to kite him, Mend Pet kept my pet up (a cat) without a problem.


Hopefully in the next few days I'll get a group for Blood Furnace and get more nice gear :) Stay tuned...