With the holiday period recently I’ve not really been playing (or blogging) much recently. I have however just managed to ding 80 for the first time ever, so I now have my own sexy army of ghouls. Awesome.

Not an exciting picture, but that’s the moment I dinged. My stats (for my reference really) when I hit 80:

Also I have recently started leveling mining and Jewel crafting, which are around 270 and 200 respectively.

Hopefully there will be some posts about Grizzly Hills and other zones soon.

Current level: 79
Spec: 50/13/07
Pwn rating: Multple Pwngasms

So, Dragonblight, now completed…

I didn’t ding 79 in this zone, in fact I just made it into 78, but I’m a bit behind on writing this post, so whatever. Deal with it. This zone I found a little boring at first, don’t get me wrong, the quests are nicely bunched together, none are too boring, and the landscape is just about varied enough. I just didn’t find it particularly fun. The Retaking the Undercity quest line at the end though completely changed my view though, yet again Blizzard has managed to do something new to me in a WotLK zone. I like.

As before, I’m just going to post random screenshot’s of some of the more memorable locations or quests to me. Without further ado…

Lets start with a landscape/structure. Wrmyrest temple, or whatever it was called. I loved this building, and the quests associated with the NPCs in there. It feels like a real place, there’s dragons and stuff swarming round it, fighting and what not. Also it’s nothing like you standard WoW structures.

My Future self and me - Not an especially exciting quest, you have to kill some evil ninja zombie ghost drakes or something. The cool part is that you get a future self to come and help you lay the smack down. It made me think of that South Park episode anyway.

More new monster models - I can’t even remember where I found this guy, but I know I’d not encountered one before myself. I like anything mental, and these guys are definitely mental. HAI GUYZ!!1!1!!1 IS IT CAN BE HUGS TIEM NAO!?

Robot Wars - More implementation of the whole vehicle/siege thing they have going on these days. Simple enough quest, you jump into one of these blight spreaders, and go infect some undead. Good times.

I HAS A BUCKET - I still love these walrus guys, like, seriously. It actually made my day when I saw one of them riding a turtle. I literally can’t get enough of them. Look at his wondrous mustache, and how delighted the turtle looks to be his mount.

More cool landscapes next. A big old dead dragon skeleton curled round a rock on the edge of a cliff in a pretty glade. Real nice combination of landscape elements.

Exploding Crawlers - Not an especially interesting screenshot I know, but the quest itself was awesome. Basically you find an elite giant crawler guy, fight him until he opens his mouth, then throw some dynamite in. Cue exploding worm, and chunks of insides for you to gather up and turn-in. Another Starship Troopers moment.

He’s a lumberjack and he’s ok - Take control of a robot, cut down trees, rip apart harpies (god I ‘effin hate harpies, second only to murlocs) what could be more fun? I tell you what could be more fun, taking off round the countryside and killing a bunch of other stuff too, just because you can, rock on.

Wyrmrest temple basement - Just a random pretty screenshot. At least I thought so.

Speaking of dragons - Giant sexy dragon boss lady. The starter of the whole reclaiming Undercity quest line. You get a nice cut scene during this, and a nice example of the real world zones changing permanently, a mechanic I was always impressed with in Guild Wars. Also, she’s a bloody big dragon.

Giant amphibian guy - I have no idea what the heck this guy is supposed to be, but I quite like him. I name him Gregory.

Giant crab - Just because I think he’s cool.

Jaws - Baiting a line to catch a giant shark, another small way Blizzard have tried to make normal quests just a little more novel.

Finally, going back to the Undercity with Thrall and Lady whatsherface, to conquer all the naughty baddies. I won’t go too much into the details, as it’s really just something that’s fun to experience, but it was a definite highlight of the zone/expansion so far. If you’re interested in seeing, below are some random screenshot’s of the event (I took hundreds for some reason).

That’s all folks, tour over.

Join us next time, when I’ll be tackling the highlands of Grizzly Hills, and hopefully congratulating myself on reaching level 80 for the first time ever.

It’s the last one for now, I promise…

Gundrak

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this instance, as I was distracted by something ‘IRL’ (I know, how inconvenient) for most of the time. However, I do remember that we 4 manned it, and I was only level 75 (most of the mobs were 77) so I was quite pleased with our performance.

It’s you standard Sunken Temple type deal. There’s some trolls, they’re mojoed up to the eyeballs and are going to sacrifice a virgin, or something similar. Also some of them are probably zombies, what is it with trolls and zombies?

So there’s some big piles of bones…

In fact, most of the scenery in here is actually pretty cool…

We fought all4 bosses (as evidenced by the 1st screenshot) which I can’t really remember much of. Angry trolls are angry. The last one is pretty cool however, he has some rhino thing going on, which I hadn’t been made aware of, so it took me a while to get my head around. you get impaled or stampeded or something anyway, and smacked about a bit, much like your average female porn star. Though I don’t think he spat in my mouth at any point…  As per usual our DPS noobadin died on this both, but no one was surprised by that. I whiffed a lot, but he went down ok.

Oh, and there was another boss (I think it may have been this instance, I’m not sure?) that was quite cool. Part-way through fighting him he like, doses you with some acid or something, and suddenly you’re fighting your own party members, and you each have to kill zombie versions of everyone else before you can continue the fight. I loved this. Especially killing Dan.

That’s all I have to say about that instance now. I actually have some quests for it now that I’ve started the Grizzly Hills quests (ding level 79) so I guess I’ll need to try and go back there at some point, for completions sake. Oh also I bought cold weather flying, so I can now fly my pretty undead parrot around. Still haven’t worked up enough money to train him up to fly faster though.

Amphitheater of Anguish

Or Ring of Blood MKII…

Anyway, at level 75 or 76 (the others were a level or two higher) we decided to scoot off and do this thingy. It’s similar to the event in Nagrand, except each step is a separate quest. This is a good idea I think, as firstly it allows different groups to alternate who is fighting, and I guess also means if you have to leave halfway through you can come back and finish it off later.

If I remember correctly there was about 5 bosses, none of which I noticed as being especially hard. I am an exceptional player though (…) so that’s no surprise. Even with 2 loladins in the group we managed to finish this with ease. See screenshot’s of a few of the bosses in it below.

Not very exciting pictures I know…

The best thing about this short quest chain was I got me a sexy new axe; De-Raged Waraxe which I am still using now at level 78. It is many pews.

Violet Hold

This instance is located within Dalaran itself, and we did this around the same level as Amphi…I’m not writing all that out again. It’s a similar sort of deal, you have a big room with a bunch of naughty monsters trapped behind force-field type things, and a constant stream of lizards and evil dogs attacking some npc guards.

So once you talk to the lady and start the event, all the other guys disappear. Tea break I assume. I can only imagine the guards work some sort of shift system, otherwise they’d get tired of the constant fighting. I can’t say I’ve actually seen them change shifts though.

So a big blue portal opens up (see picture above) and some lizard dudes come out of it. You kill them, then another portal opens somewhere else. Rinse and repeat 3 or 4 times and eventually one of the bosses behind the force fields will decide to come play. I don’t recall the order of all of these, so I won’t try and quote it, but the first was a voidwalker type mob I think. You also fight a core hound type mob (don’t forget to loot the dogs!… ah memories) and maybe another boss or two, before finally fighting a big blue dragon. There’s a story behind this fight, which I wasn’t paying attention to, along with a quest that netted me no useful rewards. Still, I’m sure it was all very immersive and well thought out.

Drak’Tharon Keep

I don’t even remember where this instance is, Grizzly Hills maybe? Anyway, it’s a fairly cool, if somewhat uninteresting instance. I can’t quite remember if it has a theme as such, there seems to be a bunch of trolls maybe, and some angry wildlife, so the standard mojo drinking pill heads that you’d have seen in ZG or wherever previously.

To reflect this, I only bothered to take like 3 screenshot’s here, and I must have run this instance like 4 times.

Highlights included trolls that fear, allowing me to almost MPK our group by bringing some of our enemies friends mid pull. Unfortunately I got an in combat res and we finished with only one of our group (a Paladin… oh no!) dead. We didn’t miss his auto attacks too much anyway.

The main highlight is fighting a Tyrannosaurus Rex, called King Dred. The fight itself isn’t anything special, but just the concept of fighting a Dinosaur is always cool, so I enjoyed this each time. It’s a fairly straight forward fight too, no gimmicky crap that I can remember.

Novos the Summoner was a pretty cool fight. Nothing that exciting, he summons waves… or was it a constant stream?… of various undead guys, and periodically some mage dude appears that you kill. After you’ve loved up Mr Mage like 4 times the main guy becomes available to fight. Pretty straight forward again, a bit of aoe damage I think, but I like the monster model so it’s all good.

The final boss is fun, but stupidly easy. He’s some worm/bat/sea-horse skeleton thing, which I’m sure is eternally pissed off about something, forever! Anyway he wails on you a bit (or gets wailed on rather) and then decides he’s really giving you too much of a hard time, so he’s going to turn you all into skeletons to make things a little easier. As Skeletons you have a taunt type move, a melee move, bone shield, and a self heal. So basically during this stage no one can really even get hurt, let alone die. After a minute of that he’ll decide to start playing hard ball again, and switch you back to normal. This routine carries on 2 or 3 times, until eventually he dies, unless you’ve got so bored you decided to go home.