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  • Archive for April, 2010

    Explorer: The Caverns of Time


    2010 - 04.26

    A couple of weeks ago I finally got to spend a few hours in the Caverns of Time, which I said I’d explore for Jaedia’s explorer task*, having never visited before.

    I’d love to say I spent ages looking around, chatting to giant dragons and small kids, but that’s not exactly how it went. A couple of guildies were running older instances and wanted to go do Black Morass. I saw this as a great excuse to get myself into the CoT so quickly hearthed back to Dalaran and ran through the portal in the Violet Citadel. A short dragonride later and I was standing in the central cavern of CoT being generally impressed with the ginormous-ness of the ginormous dragon sitting in the middle.

    Unfortunately, Black Morass has a reputation requirement that I just didn’t have, and for whatever reason neither Andornu or Nozari would let me have any quests. After a short while scouting about we decided to see what else we could do and, after a couple of false starts, ended up in Mt. Hyjal. Once in we couldn’t find the exit. And we were on 25-player mode. Feeling foolish, we decided to give it a go anyway — a warrior tank, a shadow priest and a ret paladin.

    Amusingly, we made it reasonably comfortably through the first eight waves of trash. Our spriest switched to a healing spec after the first wave and I was judging light, “seal”-ing light and gulping down honeymint tea in the gap between each wave. We were alive all the way up to Rage Winterchill, who did nasty things to us and thoroughly disabused us of any “imba” notions we might have had. We then brought in backup from the guild, and cleared all the way to Archimonde before the lateness of the hour and a problem dispelling his debuff wiped us and broke the group. It was a shame to have made it that far and not finish, but I’m sure I’ll go back at some point.

    While we were waiting for backup, I took the opportunity to go for a look around the and take a couple of tourist photos. I took quite a few more, but they kept devolving into photobomb!

    * I don’t really RP at all, and I probably have more feel for the characters of my mage and hunter alts. As alts, they have their own personas, vs the my-avatar-in-a-virtual-world approach I have with my main — a bog-standard human paladin with fancy hair. When I do think of him as a character, I think “decent, but perhaps a bit dim”, and I have a general idea of how he might respond in most situations, but he doesn’t have much of a personality.

    So I don’t think I can complete the explorer task to the high standard so many people managed, and (despite all evidence to the contrary) I don’t want to handwave a rough attempt and call it done. So I fail the task. I did still have a good time exploring the CoT though!

    Screenshot post: Introducing Bryn


    2010 - 04.25

    If for some reason you’ve read the about page here at Mysterious Buttons you might remember that one of the goals of the blog was to get the viewpoint of someone who was not only new to WoW, but new to gaming. Provided I could persuade her.

    Well, I don’t want to tempt fate too much here but I can say this: Brynhyfryd is most definitely playing, I’ve got the pics, it did happen.

    Brynhyfryd and Gwyddeon (my nelf druid). Aww, aren't they cute.

    Brynhyfryd a Gwyddeon (my nelf druid). Aww, aren't they cute.

    Relaxing after a hard afternoon's nightsaber killing.

    Relaxing after a hard afternoon's nightsaber killing.

    DISCLAIMER: dodgy Welsh courtesy of Lala

    Clever spammer, have a biscuit


    2010 - 04.24

    Hmm. Checking my spam queue the other day I found these two plausible-looking posts. When I read the first, I almost reflexively hit the “approve” button before two things happened. Firstly, the comment seemed very familiar. Eerily so. Secondly, my eyes tracked down the page and I spotted the second, identical post from a different “person”.

    Ooop, not so fast Mrs. Spammer

    Ooop, not so fast Mrs. Spammer

    So: reposting genuine comments as spam? Nice trick! Didn’t work, but full marks for effort.

    Wanted: raiding guild for brand-new raider


    2010 - 04.23

    UPDATE TO THE PREFACE: Gah, I forgot I’d scheduled this. I’ve now exchanged emails with a couple of lovely people, so to be completely clear, this is more joke than an actual want ad.

    PREFACE: I wrote this at the same time I wrote yesterday’s oh-noes-I-must-find-a-new-guild post, and thought I’d post it a day or two later as a follow-up. I wasn’t remotely expecting people to respond with anything other than sympathy. I also wasn’t expecting to see any activity in my current guild.

    That said, this still makes me giggle so it’s getting posted anyway. And Alas might get a smile from the last point in “you will be” — I swear that wasn’t edited in.

    Wanted: raiding guild for brand-new raider.

    You will be: Friendly. Tolerant of totally noob raiders. Willing to explain strategies. Interested in seeing the content and not skipping every RP event ASAP. Prepared to revisit Naxx/Ulduar/etc. Intolerant of asshats. Polite when reminding new raiders not to stand in the fire/acid/spew/pit of death. Funny in guild chat. Socially diverse. Mostly able to spell.

    I will be: Inexperienced. Slightly resistant to watching a video of every encounter before I first visit it. Willing to read strategy upon strategy. Likely to get things wrong on the first attempt or two. Or three, I don’t know yet. Clad from head-to-foot in gear purchased with badgers from random HCs. (Hopefully) adequately gemmed/enchanted. Relatively poor, so not really capable of quickly regemming/re-enchanting if *not* adequately gemmed/enchanted. “Witty” in guild chat. Verbose.  Likely to write about things that happen on a blog.

    It’s an enticing prospect, isn’t it. I think suitable guilds (of which there must be thousands, right? Right…? Hello?) will be lined up around the block to pickup a new team member like me. Why wouldn’t they?

    Hey. Why are you all looking away? Hello, I’m over here…

    I can’t see this as being anything but a struggle. Judging by the blogs I’m reading, even alt runs are all doing ICC. Either that, or doing hardmodes/achievement runs in older content. Guilds which *are* recruiting are looking to fill spaces for their progression runs, wherever they are in the sequence. Very few will have the patience to bring along a noob raider.

    *sigh*

    I guess it’s off to the realm forums for me. *shudder*

    Need food badly from Rock Paper Shotgun


    2010 - 04.23

    I’ll say this up front: you really don’t have any excuse for not reading Rock Paper Shotgun. If you play WoW, you are by definition a PC gamer (yes, even you Applecores) and there is no finer PC gaming website than RPS. If you’ve not visited before, stop reading now and go. Actually, no, wait a second. Read this first, then read the linked pages on RPS, then go read the rest of RPS.

    Thanks to my recent New York trip and a ton of business at work, I’m somewhat behind on my  feeds. Obviously, I caught up with of the lovely people in the azerosphere first, but I hadn’t yet looked in my general gaming folder. I did so just a few moment ago and what did I see? A post by Quinns on RPS called Need Food Badly? Cooking with WoW in which he and “the girl” make ready-to-eat versions of five Azerothian recipes. You should go read it, and follow the links to the five recipes from there, but to whet your appetite I’ll reproduce the links here. The folks at Nourish now have company! Yum yum.

    Spice Bread Monster Omelette
    Beer Basted Boar Ribs Smoked Desert Dumplings
    Bellara’s Nutterbar

    How could you resist? Smoked desert dumplings for me please.