Archive for August, 2006

Ever since I acquired my beautiful black raptor mount, my presence in any battleground has been scarce. You might even understand this, given that towards the end of the 4-month grind to Rank 11, I was spending 3-4 hours every weeknight, and up to 10 hours each day of the weekend in order to acquire well over 200,000 honor points each week.

With the upcoming patch v1.12, the battleground system will be changing to blend Greymane with about a dozen other servers (Battlegroup #8), and may well make battlegrounds a completely different experience. With the Burning Crusade expansion pack, the concept of PvP ranking as it stands will be going right out the door, replaced by what sounds like contribution/experience points that can be accrued and spent… on what exactly remains to be seen.

Several people over the past several months have indicated interest in getting their feet wet. Well, your time has come! This weekend is Arathi Basin (AB) double-honor — which essentially means that even if you lose, you still get a decent chunk of honor, and because of that, every n00b to ever fondle a mouse will be there. AB is (IMH0) the easiest, sanest, and most enjoyable battleground: 15 vs. 15, 30-ish minute time limit, king-of-the-mountain sort of game.

Although I expect Necromage, Gorysh, and myself to be in and out all weekend, we’re going to try to gather any and all 60′s around 10pm Greymane (8pm PST), on Saturday. We also encourage the 50-59 members to do the same, and I may well bring Skykomish along for a few.

Signups are now available for this Friday’s run of LBRS:

http://www.tikiweb.net/wow/schedule/view.php?mode=view&raid_id=15

If you want a spot, or if you think you want a spot, and you’re level 55 or higher (or even slightly lower), hit the schedule link and sign up!

No quests… we’re going to be 10-man raiding it and we’ll be going for the UBRS key and phat lewt. The plan is to hit LBRS hard and fast, taking advantage of many shortcuts to hit key areas and bosses to maximize drops. We’ll figure out which members are closest to getting the key, and prioritize gem drops for those people. And, if we sucessfully finish a key, maybe we’ll even use it!

This post was brought to you by the letter “S”, the number “32″, and with some content additions by Skykomish since we were both about to post the same thing at the same time.

Last night marked the return of Ungulataur!! We were looking for a 5th last night for a run through BRD and who do we hear from? A ghost from the past, a voice that triggers a distant memory. The wayward son has returned, Ungulataur!!

We all meet at the instance portal, send out for bullets, wait on one quest turning, then it begins. Once we fell into our rhythm, we almost sailed through. There were a few deaths, but at worst we lost two people. Ungulators ability to self-rez was very handy and a party saver, that and the uncanny ability to stay out of combat so that when Dixi did die, he was able to “combat” rez her back to finish the fight. Two mages is nice, but you have to watch out for all of the extra sheep and pigs running under foot. Out tank is getting better with every run. Did I mention we had a Shaman with us, Fire Resistance Totems FTW…

We went straight to The Grim Guzzler via General Angerforge & Golem Lord Argelmach. Once at the bar, we beat on Ribbly Screwspigot and his cronies, learned a new brew recipe, spoke to a succubus about relationships and “How to Keep Your Man”.

Then we had a meeting with Ambassador Flamelash to pick up our cloak, but he still would not give it up, stingy turd.

The Seven dwarves were very friendly, they even taught some of our team how to smelt Dark Iron, much to the Joy of those members. But, our guys must not have tipped well, because soon after the dwarves were in a huff and decided to take the tip out of our hides. We were not in a mood to oblige their payment in flesh, so we killed them instead, and looted their secret chest, tee hee.

On to the smelting room and more of our Fire Elemental friends. After a quick dance lesson, picking up a core fragment to allow easy access to Molten Core, it was off to Lord Incendius. Careful of the edge was heard as our mage over shot the stopping point and dropped in to some new friends. Lord Incendius was dispatched without much of an issue.

Then we trotted on to Fineous Darkvire, our favorite level 54 elite. Beat on some rare spawns in the vault, made our way to the Monument of Franclorn Forgewright and those that had proven themselves were rewarded with the Shadowforge key.

Then we all said our good byes, with a tear in our eye and new shards in our packs we all went our separate ways.

I hope we do not have to wait as long for the next Ungulataur sighting…

The weather is here, wish you were beautiful.

Cheers

That’s right… it’s my birthday. Presents are encouraged. Gold is appriciated. Cash is better. =]

For those interested, there will be another hit on BRD tonight (Monday, August 14th), so be sure to sign up on the Schedule. I’m sure this won’t be the last time we venture in there, especially those of us in need of smelting Dark Iron.

As a reminder we will be running 2 teams into BRD tonight. Signups can be done at Dixi’s Raid scheduler (which will be here at hfc-guild.com sometime soon):

http://www.tikiweb.net/wow/schedule/view.php?mode=view&raid_id=12

Please sign up and sign in to join the raid instance queue. The runs will start at 10:30PM server time (8:30PM Pacific) and will continue until finished. There’s a chance for another run on Darnassus, or possibly 10-man’ing Lower Black Rock Spire (LBRS) afterward, so check in to Guild Chat in-game for more details.

As usual, we’ll be on TeamSpeak. Login, channel, and password information will be relayed via Guild Chat in-game.

Hellfire Club FTW!!!