meet Grysh

Grysh is our newest entry into our alt collection. so new, in fact, that she doesn't even show up in the armory, yet (else we'd link her). Grysh is a BE death knight, which we rolled on Elune (pve server where we had our first 60 way back in classic WoW). spoiler alert, we're going to wax poetic about what it's like to start up a death knight. if you don't want to know, stop reading now.

first off, it is an AWESOME experience! blizzard did a really nice job with the death knight starting area.

you start off at level 55 with no talents and 6 abilities. it's a bit of a mystery how the whole rune/runic power system works and we think that's one of the areas where the starting zone failed a bit. a couple quests that helped demonstrate your abilities would have been helpful. anyway, it's a very manageable skill set to open up with.

you start out in green-quality gear (which looks awesome, btw. very similar to Sylvannus' old look before the 3.0.2 patch) and you're standing next to Arthas in a floating necropolis in EPL. yes, *the* Arthas. after chatting with him, you start a series of quests that have you leading the assault to destroy the scarlet crusade. over the course of a very epic quest line, which includes events like using siege weapons and piloting an undead frost dragon to massacre scarlet crusaders from above you gain blue-quality gear and talent points as quest rewards. it took us a few quests before we realized we were gaining talent points as quest rewards; it's a brilliant system.

by the time you finish the starting zone (after an epic battle between the lich king himself and tirion fordring at light's hope chapel) you've hit level 58, are decked out in full blue gear and have all your talent points. after a quick stop at a capital city for your final starting quest, you could walk right into outlands without ever setting foot in the rest of azeroth.

where it really shines, though, is in all the little details that blizzard took care of for you:

• you automatically learn all flight points on both continents


• you automatically have artisan first aid up to heavy runecloth bandages


• you start out with several weapon skills at 270


• you leave the starting zone with about 20g in cash from quest rewards and selling off old gear


• you start with 4 12 slot bags in addition to your backpack


• you leave the starting zone with your mount, which is an epic land mount (even though you're only level 58), which was free


• one of the trinkets you get as a quest reward is comparable to the standard pvp trinket that frees you from all roots and snares

every time we thought to ourselves "oh, we're going to have to go train that" it turned out we already knew what we needed to know. the only thing you have to train yourself are professions.

we can't even do justice to the quests in the starting zone. they're just very well done. what really makes it feel special is that the zone actually changes appearance *just for you* based on the quests you've completed. this is what blizzard is calling phasing. it's kind of like an instance, except that anyone that's met a certain set of requirements will see the same thing you do without having to pass through an instance entrance or anything. in the case of the DK starting zone, it changes over time (buildings are destroyed, NPCs change locations, etc.) and those changes are permanent (i.e., they don't revert after 5 minutes for the next guy in line). it's pretty cool and hard to visualize until you experience it yourself. we'll be very interested to see where this gets applied in northrend.

so, for now we're going to focus on Grysh for a bit and let all the hubbub in northrend die down a bit before we go back. we're running around the noob lands leveling up skinning and herbalism (no cash cows on this server, so Grysh will have to fund herself), but we'll be back in outlands soon enough. we can't wait!

Continue reading "meet Grysh"...

feel our wrath!

wrath is here! yay! we managed to score a collector's edition at the store thursday morning and joined the hordes in the borean tundra to see what northrend was all about. our feelings are a bit mixed so far.

the good:

• new lands to explore


• new mobs to see


• getting xp from quests and feeling a real sense of advancement again

the not so good:

• way, way too many named mobs that need killing in the early quests which require to you compete not only against the other faction (pvp server, remember) but also against your *own* faction. this is our biggest complaint. standing around for 5-10 minutes and then having to basically kill-steal from everyone else around you to get your quest done.


• most of the quest rewards aren't gear upgrades. to be fair, we're wearing mostly purples so that's not a big surprise but to only find 1 item from lvl 70 to lvl 71 that was a clear upgrade was a little disappointing


• too crowded! everyone and their dog is in the borean tundra right now and the buildings are tiny, so it's really tough to see what you're doing through the sea of bodies and floating green text

we took Harl over and quested until we hit lvl 71. the new area is awesome, the quests are generally fun and so far it seems like there's less running around (no big fedex-style quests that we can recall) then old-world quests. everything seems pretty easy so far, even killing elite quest mobs, but that's probably because most of us 70s are over-powered due to all the purple we're wearing. people are a bit douchy in their efforts to get their quests completed (kill-stealing, etc.), but that wasn't a huge surprise.

overall we had fun, but once we got to 71 we decided we would wait for a while before going back for more. it's just too crowded to really enjoy the new content. plus, we got a little sick of being on a pvp server (getting fear bombed or nuked while talking to a quest giver gets old after the 6th time). so, we hopped back over to our old pve server, Elune, and rolled a BE death knight. more on that later.

Continue reading "feel our wrath!"...

we live!

pardon our absence; we were on vacation in vietnam until last sunday eve, hence the lack of updates recently. vacation is all kinds of awesome. we highly recommend it!

today's topic? patience.

today is maintenance day and, like many maintenance days in the past, it's run overtime because blizzard ran into a snag of some sort. we managed to get on for a bit around 10:30am PST (technically before the maintenance window was scheduled to complete), but then the servers were shutdown about 15 minutes later. boo, but at least we got a few quests done.

we pinged the realm status page a few minutes later to see if the servers were back up... no response. we checked the realm status forum... down. we checked the general forum... request timed out. uh oh, that's going to be bad... sure enough, realms have been down all day. someone at blizzard is having a very bad day, we think.

cruising through the forums (when they worked) made us realize that an awful lot of people have far too much time on their hands and no idea what to do with it. so, here are a few suggestions for things to do (or not) when the servers are down:

• don't get your panties in a twist. life exists beyond WoW.


• play another game.


• read a book.


• go outside (ok, so winter's coming and maybe this isn't the best idea...).


• talk to your friends... in person.


• call your mom.


• talk to recruiters all day (we're in the midst of job hunting. yay us.)


• don't think you know more about how the game works than the blizzard staff and wax poetic about what they should be doing to fix things.


• don't harass the the forum moderators demanding answers, refunds, heads on platters or lollipops; first of all, they're the messengers and not the engineers working on the problem. second of all, it makes you look like a complete ass to berate someone that has no more control over the situation than you do regardless of who they happen to work for.


• do understand that wow is a hugely complex piece of software and no one person at blizzard or anywhere else knows how all of it works. applications this size are developed by tens if not hundreds of engineers. it's often a miracle they work at all, let alone work well. we're in the business; we know. there are lots of places for issues to creep in and slip through testing and that's not even accounting for the production environment where the software actually runs, which is managed by yet another group of 10s of people.


• don't clutter up the forums whining and moaning about how blizzard has ruined your entire day because you couldn't log into WoW. if your life is that dull, now's a great time to pick up a back-up hobby. you know, just in case the power goes out or something...


• do realize that as a customer you have the right to express your displeasure with the service up to and including canceling your subscription. if you're really that upset about 1 day of downtime then make good on all your threats to quit and do it. the WoW community will not miss you.

by all that's unholy, enough with the bitching! WoW has exceptional uptime for a service that doesn't have lives on the line (and even those still have bugs). I'd be willing to bet that the servers are up at least 95% of the time outside of scheduled downtime. facebook and twitter don't even have uptime numbers that good! all you folks complaining have no idea how lucky you are that the servers and the client run as smoothly as they do. instead of ranting about how blizzard has ruined your day due to extended downtime, maybe you should be thankful that you're even able to play the game at all. you could be much, much worse off...

Continue reading "we live!"...