Carrandas corner

So my WoW warrior finally dinged 80 yesterday. I started preparing for this great event two weeks ago by buying good blue and epic tanking gear whenever I found some for a reasonable price. If there were none available I gathered the mats and paid someone 30g to craft it. Mind you, this character is on a new server so I didn't have a 50K honeypot to lick out. But I managed to make about 5000 gold on this new server while levelling from level 51 to 80 just by shifting some items. Plenty enough gold to get a nice starting set so I can get started. Before I put on the gear I had 19.311 hp and 508 defense. After I put it all on, gemmed it and gave it some basic enchanments I had 24.000 hp and 540 defense. Just enough to start heroics! And an hour after I dinged I finished my first heroic, The Violet Hold. There's still a lot of improvements to be made to my warriors gear but if there wasn't there wouldn't be any fun in doing heroics! The last five levels were fun. I sta...

At the start of WoW warriors tanked and all other hybrids healed. The damage dealing was left for the pure DPS classes and I was happy to do so with my mage. Sure, our guild had a warrior and maybe a kitten damage dealer but druids or paladins weren't good enough to tank an end-game raid instance. And back then that worked fine. A raid needed 40 players and there were 8 classes. So you'd have about 5 warriors in your raid, enough to tank every instance. Perfect for raids but it caused a problem for dungeons. There you need one tank, one healer and three DPS classes. If only one in eight can tank then there just aren't enough tanks. In the Outland expansion every hybrid could tank as good as a warrior or heal as well as a priest while doing similar DPS to a pure DPS class. This was a great step to fix the shortage of tanks as suddenly three classes could tank. Of course this didn't completely solve the problem as most people are afraid of the responsibility to tank ...

It's been a year and a half since the last WoW expansion. Back then I levelled my DPS deathknight from level 55 to 80. For these past few months the WoW microbe has been tickling again so it was time to start levelling a new character. I've still got a stabled level 70 mage, hunter and warlock but I decided to go and level my lvl 51 warrior as I want to try out a new play style, tanking. And it's surprising how much has changed in these past eighteen months. The first thing I noticed is the big improvement in levelling speed. The levels seemed to fly past as I rushed to level 60. But not only those levels went by fast, the 60-70 range also goes by a lot faster. I still followed James Levelling Guide but I could skip entire zones. It only took me Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, Nagrand and part of Blade's Edge to get to level 70. When the guide told me that I'd now ding level 62 I was already level 63. And the biggest change to this range is of course that I cou...

Returning from a long WoW break always brings some novelties. I can now buy a flying mount for my level 60 warrior!  My warrior gets Shield Slam for free! And everywhere I look I see "Need one member for instance X, minimum gearscore 2800, link achievement". It seems like everyone has been brought back to a single number. The e-peen meter promised by Blizzard two weeks ago doesn't seem so funny any more. Out of curiosity I checked the gearscore meter of my stabled Death Knight. She ran Naxxramas until she had everything she needed. Yet I saw people looking for members for their Naxx run with a gear score above mine. Why would someone who doesn't need a single item from Naxx anymore still want to run it? The people who do want to raid Naxx will be those who have gear from heroics, not people who are doing Icecrown Citadel. Looking at the past, the gearscore does feel like a natural evolution. Everyone wants to run a fast instance without wipes. If you only instanc...

This week I found this in my mailbox: At first glance it looks like a genuine e-mail from Blizzard, it even passed Hotmails spam filter. But I quickly remembered that I didn't get this kind of e-mail when someone changed my password and actually hacked my account two months ago. Giving this message a closer look quickly gives more hints to show us that it's a fake: "you Login verify your password" - Bad English in an automatically generated mail? No professional company would send this mail let alone one based in the United States; " If you are unable to successfully verify your password . using the automated system" - That's not even a proper sentence. As every WoW player should know, Blizzard will never ask you to enter your password. The link of course: " http://us.battlu.net/login/login.htm?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldofwarcraft.com%2Faccount%2F&app=wam %2Fwww.worldofwarcraft.com%2Faccount%2F&app=wam " - us.battlu.net? Battl...

Reviving old content is a great way to keep your player base happily playing with a minimal of developing efforts. In the past WoW has seen the introduction of revamped dungeons such as Naxxramas and Onyxia. And now Blizzard has come up with a new way to extend the lifetime of their old content. The newest patch introduces a "Looking for Group" party across servers. This creates a much bigger player base to choose from when forming a pick up group. And they've added two new emblems for every successful random pug you run. So there are new items to be gained from running the old instances and it's easier to find a group for them. There's also some real new content in the form of three more instances. Using the LFG tool seemed like a great way to try out these instances and the new LFG method. So I queued up for the first, new dungeon and after ten minutes I could join a group. I was pleasantly surprised to see the option to teleport to the instance. Once upon a t...

Seeing my World of Warcraft account getting hacked wasn't much fun but it does have one positive side. Since I had to pay €15 to get my deleted items back I decided to log in a few times this month and see what changed. I haven't played WoW since April this year so there's quite a bit of new content to go through. And of course I wanted to say hello again to all the friends I haven't spoken to in months. As I logged in I was quickly greeted by some of my guild members. Time is never standing still so I wasn't surprised to see that my guild looks nothing like it did half a year ago. Roughly half of the people I enjoyed chatting and playing with had all decided to join a guild that was more to their liking. Only the officer team seems to be relatively intact. The player gap has been filled in with lots of new players but it doesn't feel like the same guild. I had a chat with the old officers and my friends from ancient times. In this short time I even got a few...

You always think that these things only happen to others. You may even think that they should have used better protection. And then one day you get this mail in your box from your guild leader: Hi there, I dont know if this email will arrive, but I will try anyway. I saw that your chars came online today. They are selling all your gear and equipment and they are not answering on guild chat. I think you are being hacked. Suddenly it's not someone else who has been hacked. It's you! So I quickly took a  look in my second mailbox account and yes: someone merged my account to a battle.net account. My account has been frozen for half a year so someone must have hacked it and have reactivated it. Next thing I did was checking my characters and my armory page looked like this: Kind of them to put on my Christmas hat, it's the season!. Everything that a vendor will accept is sold however. After seeing that picture I  really started to worry. They reactivated my accou...