Overall I enjoyed the game, it was a little shorter than I expected, but then at the same time I don’t like games that go on too long.

Notable evil deeds:

- Hiring a prostitute, smashing down the door to some guys house, taking said prostitute upstairs and having unprotected sex with her, with the guys wife and kid in the house. Deciding I liked the look of the house and to buy it, but then finding out it was more expensive than I was anticipating. Killing owner of house to reduce its sale price, then renting it out at an unfairly high rate.

- Joining the evil temple guys, and going on a quest for them to slaughter an entire village of innocents. Cackling manically as I chased villagers through corn fields before murderising them. Later returning to the evil temple guys, collecting my reward, and then murdering them too.

Just a couple of unsavoury examples there. The best part (I think) about fable is that your character appearance changes over the course of the game, in line with both your good/evil rating and your pure/corrupt rating. I intend to at some point play through again being “good” (meh) so that I have a third picture for comparison, but below you can see how I started out, and how I ended up.

Yes, I was pretty hideous by the time I finished the game. That’s pretty much max on both evil and corruptness. The blue lines on my skin show the amount I used magic (a lot) and the scars are from dying and such I think. Tattoos are store purchased and the horns I think are from being corrupt. Not sure what changed my eyes from brown to green.

So yeah, almost 3 months without a blog post, and I was doing so well too. This is mainly due to epic levels of cba, along with a fair bit going on in my real life. So anyway, I just renewed the domain so I figure I should at least try and post something, maybe this will motivate me to start up again.

As far as WoW goes, thing’s have died off a little. Since my last update I have done 2 main things; leveled characters using the refer a friend thingy, and leveled and raided a bit on my Shaman.

I decided to use refer a friend to level a couple of characters purely by boosting them in instances, mainly so I could get Mage back up into the 60s. I’d enjoyed playing my Draeni Mage, but after leveling that 1-72 I didn’t much fancy doing it all again Horde side. So I made a Blood Elf Mage, and a Tauren Warrior and off I went. I borrowed Dan’s Paladin to do the boosting (see Dans boosting guide if interested) though he did a lot of the actual boosting himself while I just followed him round. The idea behind this was to then consequently get my Mage to 80 and start playing that, as I was bored of Death Knight. Of course, with me nothing ever turns out how I plan, because I can’t be bothered to see these things through. The Mage made it to like 66 before I got bored and realised I couldn’t be bothered.

My next decision was to try a healing class, as I’d raided as a healing Priest pre-TBC and enjoyed it. I was also actually ok at it, which is surprising. I had Shaman at 66, priest at 62 and Paladin at 70 at this point. I decided on Shaman, as I tried Paladin healing and it was horribly boring, and I’d played priest before. Also Chain Heal looks pretty.

So Shaman got leveled, both as Enhancement and Elemental. Mainly Elemental, as I duoed the majority of the time with Dan’s Feral Druid. Set my off-spec as Resto and we did all the instances whilst leveling etc. I actually managed to stick with Shaman to 80, which I am more than a little surprised about. Stayed Resto a good month or so, did all the heroics (well most of) and cleared Nax a few times. At this point I went away on holiday, which basically spelled the demise for my Shaman. A week away in the sun without WoW basically evaporated all of my motivation. Now after being back for 2 weeks I’ve probably only logged in 3 times, so I guess Shaman is out of the window now too.

At the moment I currently have 2 gaming related activities going on in my spare time:

Fable 2

Just getting back into this. I’d bought it on my Xbox when it first came out, but not played it more than a few hours so never really got into it. I bought Fallout 3 at the same time and spent more time playing that. Buying 2 console games at the same time is always a bad idea for me. So I’ve started this up again, and decided to be as evil as possible. I’m pleased with the options you have within game to do this, though most of the time you can kind of see where the game is allowing you to make the choice, and funneling you in the direction it wants you too. I’ve managed to “beat” the game a few times by being evil in ways I don’t think it expected, but this doesn’t usually alter the story in any way. Its just personal satisfaction at having deviated from the expected paths. This is what I’m spending most of my time playing at the moment, I may even knock together a blog post or two about it.

FFXI

Ugh, I can’t believe I just typed those words. Yes, the game I spent like 2 years playing and hated by the time I stopped, I am currently in the process (or about to be) of trying it again. Me and Dan both seemed a bit bored with WoW, and as per usual have been looking at other MMOs to flake to for a while. With the announcement of FFXIV coming out next year, I think our interest in all things Final Fantasy have been piqued. So Dan found a copy with all the addons on the net for under 20 squid, we ordered it, and away we go I suppose. Apparently the soloability (if that’s even a word) of the game is greatly increased these days. One of my major problems with it back in the day (like 5+ years ago now) was that you couldn’t do shag all without a group of 6 people, as anyone who’s played it could attest to. It seems they’ve done a number of things these days to improve that; increased exp from mobs that can be killed solo, created exp rate increase rings, added collection/kill quests in zones and I think added a few more zones where there’s level appropriate stuff to kill solo or in small groups. So the plan currently is for me and Dan to get ourselves to 30, mainly duoing with a little bit of group work if we feel like it, grab some advanced jobs, and get back on the FFXI train. Choo Choo!

Should keep me busy for a month or two anyway. With Aion and FFXIV on the horizon at least there’s a few things to look forward to trying.

Over and out.

Ok, so just a general update as far as what I’ve done in PVE content since coming back to Horde and before 3.1 popped.

I can’t remember whether I already mentioned Nax or not, but I’ve cleared it with our little group a few times now. Not an achievement as such, or anything particularly exciting, but I’ve managed to survive every fight at least once without watching it from the floor now, so I’m happy. As far as I’m concerned that’s Nax ticked off my list as done.

The last two fights were of particular interest to me, I liked the mechanics involved. The first Sapphiron fight we did I survived no problem. I died during the second one, even though I was definitely standing behind the ice block thingy on my screen. I was told this happens sometimes though, so no big deal I guess. Kel’Thuzad I died early on in the fight the first time. This was due basically to me being unaware of everything that was going on in the fight. I died to one of the red void zone thingies, or whatever they’re called. Second run I managed to survive the fight, just. My DPS was a bit weak though, as I was focusing on trying to stay alive most of the time. I find the “keep 10 yards away” thing a touch tedious in quite a small space, but whatever, it wasn’t that bad.

The next boss in my attempt to get as much done as possible pre-3.1 as Satharion. I’d seen a few videos of this guy, so I knew roughly what was to be expected. We took the easy option (of course) and killed the three drake dudes first (I’m pretty sure they’re called drake dudes…) and then engaged the big boss by himself. I did get caught in one of the flame wall things, but I survived so it was all good. The fight was fairly unremarkable aside from that, and I didn’t get any loot.

My intention was to try and do Malygos too, and we were planning on doing so the night before 3.1 was released. However we were a bit low on numbers, so I still haven’t done that encounter yet. Hopefully I’ll get around to that at some point soon. The fight sounds quite fun and involved.

Lastly, although technically I did this after 3.1 came out, I’m going to include it in here anyway. We did Culling of Stratholme a few times, and I got my Reins of the Bronze Drake. One of my friends had a tiny emo strop because he’d decided he wanted it first and that I shouldn’t have rolled, but he got his the next day so no harm done I suppose.

Much prettier than the turkey skeleton I’m used to flying…

I’ve been a bit slack at updating this blog as of late, predictably mainly due to laziness, but also general business. I’ve still been playing my DK regularly, in fact I’m pretty surprised I haven’t flaked off onto something else completely yet. I have started another class (more info on that in a post coming shortly) but I’ve managed to maintain regular activity on my DK, which pleases me.

In the last few weeks I’ve managed to tick off most of the pre-Uldar content, which is something I wanted to do just so that I’ve seen it all. I’m not at the “bleeding edge” of raid content, whatever that is, it sounds painful, and I have no desire to be… I do want to stop missing out on even seeing content though. My not-so-friendly little posse seems to have found another similar group of people, meaning that between us we usually have enough bodies around to do some 10 man content. It’s all very relaxed, and we seem to have gone a week without doing anything as a group, and no one seems bothered by it. At least not on our end. This pleases me greatly, I’m completely up for doing stuff once or twice per week, but it’s nice to know I’m not going to be under any substantial pressure to do so.

The number of gear changes in the last few weeks are pretty minimal, but a few small steps in the right direction are always a good thing. The number of blue items on my character are slowly reducing, being replaced by shiny purple ones. A few more weeks and Nax clears and I should be good to start thinking a little more about 10 man Uldar.

Recent acquisitions:

Heroes’ Scourgeborne Battleplate – picked up from some boss in Nax, rather than bought with badges. Does that make me slightly more imba? I assume it does. It allowed me to spend my badges on Tattered Dreadmist Mantle for my new alt instead. Oooooh, bit of a clue there for you as to what I’m leveling, exciting huh?

Glyph of Dark Death – Picked up from the AH just this morning, I’m pretty sure this was a recent addition with the 3.1 patch. Either that or I’m an idiot and just completely missed it before. It replaced my crappy  Icy Touch glyph anyway.

Purple Trophy Tabard of the Illidari - “That’s not an upgrade!” I hear you cry… well you’re wrong, so how about you shut up? It’s an upgrade to my looks, which anyone who’s played a number of MMOs for a good amount of years knows is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT PART of your character. This is one of the cooler looking tabards, so I decided to quickly do the quest one afternoon. There are some other cooler looking ones out there, but you don’t see quite so many people wearing this one since WotLK.

Current targets:

There’s a couple of things I have my eye on as far as my next upgrades go…

Greatsword of the Sin’dorei – From the new Argent Tournament, or whatever it’s called. Getting this I think (though I haven’t fully investigated yet) is just a case of doing the dailies and what not every day until I have enough tokens to buy it. I’m not too sure whether technically this is an upgrade over my current weapon. I’d be dropping 23 Strength but gaining 45 Haste and a little more hit rating. Having a quick read round, it seems Haste has been improved slightly for melee classes come 3.1, so I’m assuming this weapon might actually be a pretty decent investment. Also it puts me even further over the special hit cap. I think I’ll then be in a position where I could drop my Sphere of Red Dragon’s Blood without dropping below the cap. What I’d replace it with right now I’m not 100% sure, maybe the Oracle trinket, unless I can find something better. I’d need to work on Oracle rep for that though, meh.

Heroes’ Scourgeborne Gauntlets – I’m planning on buying these with badges, as I don’t imagine I’ll be getting lucky with a drop of them (or anything better) anytime soon. I currently have about 25/40 of the badges required I think, so another week or two (depending on how many heroics I can be bothered to do) should net me some new gloves. The 2 piece set bonus will be nice too… hmm, maybe I’ll work a bit harder on getting those.

Flame-Bathed Steel Girdle – From heroic Nexus. Got lucky (presumably) on the drop and got this the first time I ran it. Very nice waist.

Mirror of Truth – From badges. Pretty good trinket from what I can tell, and a nice proc. I haven’t actually paid attention to how often it procs as of yet.

Shoulderplates of Bloodshed – From Nax itself, Heigan I think. First piece of really decent loot I got there, I was well happy. Love the DK armour models too, so I’m most pleased with these.

As far as Nax itself goes, last week was my first full run. The last time I’d done it some of the bosses had already been killed, and we stopped before we got to the end. I think I’d ended up completing two quarters. Last week we did an entire run in one go, from start to finish, and it went really well. The final boss was the only one I got myself killed on where we weren’t wiping anyway. This was mainly due to the fact I wasn’t really sure on the strategy. I didn’t know I was going to be going to Nax though, in my defense. I am also very lazy.

My DPS was respectable and I picked up on all the strategies quickly enough anyway, so I was pleased. Plus its always fun to bug Dan by making him give me details on how to do things when he’s trying to concentrate on other things.

I think I’m pretty much as well equipped as I can be right now anyway, give or take one or two lucky drops and a few more badges to chuck around. So now would be the right time to start another alt, I mean why not!? More on that next time…

That’s right little Oracle guy, shinies!!!

After my unexpected shift back to horde, and my subsequent respec, I decided this Friday to try and improve my Death Knight a bit. I was basically wearing greens and the odd quest blue, with a single epic cloak I’d got from my one run in Nax months ago. Not really a DK cloak as such I don’t think, but it’s pretty decent. The following is what I’ve managed to round up Friday and the rest of the weekend when I’ve been around:

Sigil of Arthritic Binding – After looking up specs, catching up in Death Knight news and checking out the new Sigils, this was my first target. Basically it involved collecting 30 tokens from the PvP area in Grizzly Hills. As I had Friday off work I decided to do this mid-morning. Getting the tokens was pretty straight forward, some of the quests give 10 at a time, so it only took me 30 mins tops. One of them involved riding a torpedo and blowing up a ship, which is awesome.

Next I decided to see what I could do to improve my gear via Ah/badges (basically stuff that didn’t involve me putting any effort in). WoWLoot and WoW Insiders gear guides helped me here…

Pendant of the Outcast Hero – I was only a few badges short of the smexy trinket from my heroic badges, but I figured I may not be doing any for a while, so I picked up this neck piece. Not much else to say here, it was a significant improvement over my previous one, and a nice shiny purple colour. If only it had some Strength on it.

Vengeance Bindings – These I picked up off the AH. I can’t for the life of me remember how much I paid for them, but it really wasn’t very much. I think I had some rubbishy greens in that slot up until now, these are a pretty solid investment without stepping into an instance I reckon. Probably should have bought them sooner.

Titansteel Destroyer – Next was the big one, the weapon. I was toying with the idea of gathering the mats for this myself, as I know people who can craft it. However with my absence of luck finding titanium nodes, lack of frozen orbs, and general laziness, I figured I’d buy one instead. I managed to find one on the ah for just under 1500g, which I figured was a pretty good deal. And so began an epic afternoon of money making. I decided to go to Ice Crown, so that I could both make money and work on my Knights of the Ebon Blade rep (for Death-Inured Sabatons) at the same time. I ended up doing the majority of the quests in this zone (120/140 at the moment I think) and got the weapon from the AH, woo. I made just over 1,600g in a single day, which is by far the biggest day for me ever.

Signet of Bridenbrad – I wasn’t planning on this, it just happened to be a reward from one of the Ice Crown chains that was an upgrade over what I had in that slot.

Arcanum of Torment – Put one of these on my head piece. Nothing that exciting, but yeah, it’s still a gear improvement right.

By my standards, this is an epic weekend of upgrades, especially considering it was pretty much all done in a single day. The next two things on my list to get are:

Death-Inured Sabatons – about 4k rep left

Spiked Titansteel Helm – When I’ve made the money. I have about 700g right now, and the ones on the Ah are like 1,000g. I did see one for 750g though, so I’m holding out for one at a reasonable price.

I suppose the next step will be to start getting some enchants…

friends… apparently.

So after a month and a half of playing alliance (and actually frigging enjoying it!) I’m back horde side. I got online one day to a “how would you feel about playing some horde?” message from Dan, and knew straight away what would be happening. My closest gaming friends are flakes. I do not use this as a criticism of course, because I’m one myself, I will admit I was quite surprised though. I was genuinely enjoying playing Mage, I liked my Draeni, and was about as close as I get to being really angry/annoyed by something in an online game these days. That basically just means I spent 10 mins calling Dan all sorts of nasty names, then logger back over to my Orc.

Upon getting back to Horde side I was unsure of what to do. I hadn’t missed Death Knight that I was aware, and my Mage is only level 35 on Horde.

WHY OH WHY CANT I TO FACTIONS TRANSFERS!?

So I was umming and arring between referring a friend and trying to boost a Mage/Warlock up, leveling my Rogue (currently 70) or trying to get back into the Death Knight. I decided to gear up my Death Knight a bit and plod along with her until I made up my mind. First step was to try a new spec for real. I’d been Blood almost all of the time I’d been leveling DK, and 100% of the time since. I was tempted by Dual Wield, but it seems DW got nerfed a bit recently. Frost hasn’t interested me that much, so I decided to go with a cookie cutter (I think) Unholy build. I have to say I love it! My DPS is better, having a ghoul out 100% of the time is rewarding, and the rotation is much comfier than Blood.

So anyway, here I am, back where I was 2 months ago, but now with a level 72 Draeni Mage on another realm, whoop… I’m assuming I might actually be playing Death Knight for a while now, but who knows. I’ll just go where’s my buddies go. It’s interesting to see how different people handle these sorts of things actually, some seem to largely not care what’s happening, as long as they’re with the people they enjoy playing with. I’d put myself in this category. Others seem to have a massive emotional attachment to the investment they’ve made in a specific character, or maybe they just don’t like not being the one making the decisions. Either way I can’t imagine myself ever deliberately distancing myself from anyone I consider a friend due to an online game.

At least I don’t have to be friends with male Night Elves now…

Shatter + Ice Shards + Frostbolt + Ice Lance = good times (about 5,000 dmg @ lv70)

Frostbolt + Frostbite + Shatter + Frostbolt + Ice Lance = Brain Freeze + Fireball = dead mob

Precision + Frost Channeling + Improved Water Elemental + Arcane Concentration + Evocation + Mana Emerald = many manas

7 Shoveltusks + Frost Nova + Blizzard + Water Elemental (Freeze) + Blizzard (Cone of Cold = 7 x dead Shoveltusk

Ok enough, that really wasn’t going anywhere. Frost has cool combos for soloing though.

Yes, that is me surfing a flaming harpoon through the air. Epic does not even begin to explain. I think this may have been my favourite moment of… well life really. Maybe not quite, but you get the idea. I can imagine the moment someone though of this at Blizzard, people must have plotzed. I’m assuming numerous whoops and high fives followed. I can’t actually remember why I was surfing a flaming harpoon, I think it was just a way for the game to transport me back to one of the Alliance villages, but it really doesn’t matter.

Howling Fjord is pretty much exactly as it was on Horde; annoying. You have a fairly big zone, with like 3 or 4 little villages spread around it, and a few other random quest giver NPCs standing around by themselves in the wilderness. It has to be one of the more annoying places to level in the entire game. I don’t think I’ve found myself doing more than about 5 quests at a time the whole zone. I’m the sort of person who likes to pull up his quest log and see a big long list of

Quest of pwnage (complete)
kill 10 boars (complete)
kill 10 more boars (complete)
collect some boar liver (complete)
I don’t like liver (complete)
Your mum (group) (complete)
More dots! (complete)

and well, you get the idea. Howling Fjord does not offer me this. Having said that, the quests that it does offer at least attempt to avoid too much repetition, which makes it just about bearable.

Below are some random screenies that are at least semi cool moments from this zone. Luckily I’m at about 100/130 quests now, so I should be leaving pretty soon.

Yes I have an ugly UI I know. I’m intending on sorting it out at 80 once I cam remove a bunch of the leveling gumpf (technical term) I have.

One last thing, casting polymorph on a flying bird results in a flying penguin!

Admit it, you didn’t know penguins could fly did you?

Anyone who checks this blog (does anyone check this blog?) will have noticed a continued absence of updates for the last month or so. This is not to say that I haven’t been playing, more just that I can’t be bothered blogging about it. After leveling my Death Knight just a couple of months ago, it’s hard to be motivated to blog about the same levels again so soon. Even if the perspective is very slightly different when playing alliance. I’ll try and put something down though…

Schoz (yet another original character name there) the Mage is currently sitting at level 71, in the crap pot that is Howling Fjord. So basically since my last update *checks blog* I’ve done the vast majority of Outlands, and a little Northrend.

I won’t say much about Outlands, as its more of the same, everyone’s done it. I basically did the whole of Hellfire and Zangamarsh, skitted through Terrokar doing most of that zone, and dinged 68 after doing about 2/3 of Nagrand. I then decided to go to Netherstorm to do a few quests to upgrade gear and at least make a little dent into 68 before heading to Northrend. That didn’t last long, about a third of a level I guess, but I suppose it helped some. I decided to do Howling Fjord first again, just to get it out of the way really.

On the whole Outlands was pretty smooth. I kept putting all my points into Frost, so my survivability was excellent. I think I did once or twice during the whole of 58-68, and that was only due to being stupid. Experimenting with my water elemental has been good fun, I could quite easily kill 6-7 mobs without losing any HP. As it stands now, I’ve switched and added a few points into the Arcane tree in order to get clearcasting, quite how much this is helping me as far as mana goes I don’t know right now, but maybe that will become more evident in instances etc.

Planning on doing a small report on Howling Fjord next, then maybe some observations on Mage talents from my point of view. Just keeping things ticking over…