Phat Phat Lewtz

Well, well, well. It was a most profitable weekend for Trinity Hunters. Onyxia was slain on Friday and Sunday night and she shows hellza Hunter love. Friday's drops included Dragonstalker's Helm and a Mature Black Dragon Sinew. I had been passing on all the recent Giantstalker armor so that I could save for either the Ancient Petrified Leaf or the sinew, if they dropped. So I was pretty stoked when Onyxia dropped the sinew.

Friday night's Molten Core raid resulted in Garr dropping Giantstalker's Helm, which I took seeing as how even with taking the sinew/leaf I still wound up ahead on the DKP charts.

Sunday night Onyxia dropped another sinew and another DS Helm. Because of Hunter positioning on the DKP scale, and the fact that the only Hunter above me already had the Dragonstalker's Helm, I could opt to purchase the tier 2 head if I wanted to. Fortunately, all the Hunters in the raid are fucking awesome so they all agreed that if I passed on the helm, they would all pass as well so that it would come back around to me again, but with a significantly lowered DKP cost associated with it (due to the loot rules Trinity uses). So I got the upgraded armor.

And then what should Domo drop during MC that same night? The fucking leaf! After three straight weeks of Eye of Divinity drops, he finally dropped the leaf.

This means that I've got all the pieces I need to get started on my Hunter epic bow quest.

This quest involves killing four elite Demons found all throughout the world. I can receive no assistance at all. I can't have priests healing me, I can't have anybody else doing damage to the Demons whatsoever. It's a one-on-one showdown smackdown. I know it's just a fucking computer game, but I'm pretty nervous here. A lot of Hunters have guildmates indirectly helping them (giving fortifying magical buffs before all the fights, clearing the area of battle of random monsters that could fuck it up for the Hunter, etc..) and I imagine I'll be asking my guild for similar help. So I can't be dicking around with this shit. Can't be wasting their time and my gold (for all the expensive restorative potions and weapon enchants I'll need).

Consider it a Hunter's rite of passage.

And the reward for a successful finish of the quest? Rhok'delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers.

It's motherfucking on.

It's A PvP Server

One of the fun aspects of playing World of Warcraft is the forums that Blizzard provides for its players. There is no cross-faction communication available in-game (save for the tiny number of work-arounds that have been used), so the forums are a way for nerds to talk shit or otherwise to the other faction. (There are also Ventrilo servers and IRC channels where players of each faction can communicate as well.)

One of the more fun aspects of the forum crawl is to discover e-drama that tends to crop up every so often. Last week was such a week.

First, for reference to those of you who are unaware of the most recent patch content that was unveiled, a primer.

Patch 1.9 came out a couple of weeks ago with promise of new 20- and 40-man raiding instances known as Ahn'Qiraj. The difference between these instances and others that were introduced, like, say, Blackwing Lair or Zul Gurub, is that there is something of a server-wide effort necessary to open the gates of Ahn'Qiraj.

Essentially the billions of evil bug-like creatures held within the gates of AQ are getting ready to pwn the inhabitants of Azeroth and patch 1.9 brought about something called the AQ War Effort. There is a bunch of gathering to be done: leather, ores, bandages, foodstuffs, and the like. People from all over the server are hunting these materials down in order to meet the massive turn-in requirements. There is also a huge story-arc that runs in parallel with this regarding killing powerful dragons in order to collect pieces of a sceptre to forge which will be ultimately used to open the gates.

This effort is equally divided among both factions. Ultimately, the world-event of opening the AQ gates will require cooperation between Horde and Alliance.

That being said, apparently in Silithus there was some unwritten peace treaty between Horde and Alliance in order to attempt to speed up the collection of war materiel or some other bullshit.

It was in Silithus that two members of Trinity were griefing the shit out of a few members of the Horde nub guild Shadowflame. This, of course, lent to a new message thread being started on the forums entitled "Trinity needs to handle their members," or something similar, where Shadowflame was bitching about these two guys camping them, killing them, and pwning them up for hours.

Ah, yes, the classic thread whining about being camped. These threads pop up every so often with the predictable response by everyone of, "It's a PvP server, nub. Cry more. lern2play. kthxbai." Ultimately the newb who posted the bitch thread gets ridiculed into silent submission.

Shadowflame, however, decided to take the drama to the next level. They said that they were being griefed while trying to summon high-level monsters in Silithus and that Trinity was impeding the forward progression of the AQ War Effort and the opening of the gates. Two things were immediately pointed out: 1) The AQ gates will open automatically. Taking part in the war effort can only accelerate the opening of the gates. 2) The activities that Shadowflame were taking part in had nothing at all to do with opening the AQ gates. But that which they pushed the most fervently was that there was a truce between Horde and Alliance in Silithus so that our server could open up AQ faster.

Sorry. It's a PvP server. Whatever truce a few guilds may have between each other is not going to be followed by everybody on the server. Some don't even give a shit about a truce. When you roll a PvP server, you're pretty much accepting your fate of getting the shit kicked out of you while you're leveling up your noob character. That's how things are on a PvP server.

If you wanted the option of turning off your PvP flag, you should have rolled an RP or PvE server. Then you could level and quest in peace.

So the thread escalated as many members of Trinity came to the defense of our guild-mates, told the Shadowflame fucks to cry more and to re-roll PvE, the fuckin' carebears, etc., etc.. Which only caused Shadowflame to whine louder.

No one has any sympathy for them. They threatened to put all of Trinity on KOS (kill on sight) status - essentially start a guild war with us. That's fine. Shadowflame hasn't even set foot in MC, whilst Trinity has MC through Domo on farm status.

In fact our guild leader has encouraged us to kill Shadowflame wherever we see them. He's gone so far as to go to their website and look at the guild events they've got planned so Trinity can go raid them.

Which is funny as shit.

PvP servers for the win, bitches.

The Push To Lt. Commander

I was surprised and delighted to see that I had squeaked into rank 9, Knight-Champion, this week. I had been stuck at Knight-Captain for about three weeks, PvP'ing only half-heartedly and doing slightly more than the minimum in order to keep my ranking at or above last week's level. There was a point in time where I considered giving up the PvP honor farm game because I was stuck at rank 8 for the longest time.

This unexpected rank up has motivated me. I am only one honor bar away from Lieutenant Commander's rank and the PvP shoulders and helmet. The rank 10 PvP armor set looks pretty impressive, and I'll definitely post a picture once I get it.

My goal for the week is at least 1400 honor kills. I can do 200 HKs per day, and possibly more on the weekends. On Tuesday because of a show I went to with friends I only accumulated 87 HKs, so I had to make up for my losses last night. After getting into a group of guys who do Battlegrounds non-stop (as some of them have aspirations to hit Grand Marshal), the honor and the rep was flowing non-stop. I racked up 323 honor kills to regain my 200 HK/night average. Not only that but I became revered with the League of Arathor and bought the AB boots just for shits. They're not really any better than the rank 7 boots, but they may be useful for my elite bow quest later on.

Once I get to rank 10, the rank 11 elite mount is only another bar of honor away, so I may as well do that. At Commander I stop for good.

Fuck The Mages

Well, the 1.9 patch went live a couple of days ago and it sucks ass. First and foremost there was the pet pursuit speed normalization. Yes, now a turtle will run to a target as fast as a wolf or a tiger. All in the name of "game balance."

Fuck that fucking shit. I got a goddamn tiger because they're supposed to be faster than fucking turtles. And now I have to sit on my ass waiting an eternity for my now slow-ass cat to get to a mob before I can start firing. Bullshit. Bull-fucking-shit.

Yes, sure, everybody agrees that the Alterac Valley frostwolf and the Zul'Gurub bat were way too fast. Slow them down and you've fixed the problem, right? After all, those were the only ones who could actually chase down epic mounts (though by the way all the other ignorant fucks were whining about it, EVERY pet could chase down an epic mount).

But could Blizzard just tame those two instances down and leave it at that? No. No, because those fucking mages and priests didn't want to be chased down by a pet as they were fleeing a fight.

"ZOMG, your pet is chasing me! hax! I should be able to run away from a tiger! overpowered!"

Our pets are described by the game manual to be useful for chasing down fleeing mobs or players. Now they can't even do that. Now they've been nerfed because there are too many mages and rogues and priests out there who can't play for jack shit, who suck ass, who should quit life, and want the game developers to repatch the game because they just suck too much.

So thanks to the incessant whining of the clothies, my pet has, for all intents and purposes, become useless.

Fucking mages.