Assault on Utgarde Keep

A keep that inspires both awe and terror to anyone within miles. It can be seen from every corner of Howling Fjord and it is home to the elite of the vrykul, lead by King Ymiron and his blackguards. Today however, terror was delivered to the vrykul as our five brave heroes entered and laid waste to the over-confident defenders.

None of the three leaders would live up to their legends and in the end, even under the wrath of his master, even Ingvar the Plunderer fell to our swords & spells. Running instances does not get better than this. Crew of friends and fine people, plowing enemies and having a joy. Congratulations to all on a job well done for the benefit of the free people of Northrend and we will see you again, on assault to the pinnacles, where the king himself now await, enraged by the defeat of his trusted lieutenants.

Ulduar Nerfed

I just got onto the blogsphere about this subject and it is raising mixed feelings in me. Nothing beats live testing by millions of players around the clock and it is inevidable that many things needed to be tweaked. However, the reason I was personally very excited over Ulduar was because it represented a step up from Naxxramas, as far as difficulty curve was. It was exciting for the very reason that it was suppose to be difficult.

This is my main grudge here. Seems Blizzard is nerfing Ulduar too much now and it is just becoming another Naxxramas, a farm instance for any uninitiated raiding guild, when it is suppose to represent finess and skill for those who clear it.

Please do not get me wrong, I applaude to the idea that raiding has become more accessible to people who have jobs, children, and life outside the game and who do not claim to represent the highest elite of gamers. This is a good thing because raiding is a natural part of a character's evolutionary process and everyone should be priviledged to experience it.

However, there should still be a line I think, from where on out the game actually gets harder, even for raiders. The difference in 10-man and 25-man versions makes sense. There is a really tangible shift when you move from one to the other, with many Naxx encounters becoming really hard on 25-man versions.

In Ulduar, I would expect the 10-man encounters be on the par with 25-man Naxx and the 25-man encounters to go beyond the hardest of what Naxx 25 has to offer. But now it seems this simple logic is becoming escewed and no one anymore knows what the difficulty curve is. The fact that most bosses also have what's called a Hard Mode only adds unnecessary complexity to it. We already had a mechanism for that in place pre-3.1.

This was the achievement system. To get an achievement to run heroic encounters in a more difficult manner or finishing a wing of Naxxramas with less than nine people already provided what we needed for gifted players to set themselves apart. Sounds to me that Blizzard is just trying too hard. All we really needed was another Naxx size raid instance, which Ulduar delivers beautifully, with an increased level of difficulty and better gear drops.

Let us hope Blizzard doesn't break by fixing what just doesn't need fixing.

Achn of the Holy Light

The time has come, yet again, to begin leveling a lower level. Nothing sounds less pleasing however, to once more be in the shoes of a weakling, before even my first mount and scratching together gear from quests and the few instances that you get a group for. I am in a slightly better position though, since I am leveling a holy priest; pretty much guaranteeing me a spot in any group.

But still, the numbness of reaching my level 80 on Durithim is still fresh in my memory, so I will opt a different method to rising up the ladders; instances. When running solo, quests are the single best way to level with reletive speed, but if you have a dedicated group, running instances is not only quicker but also more interesting. At least for me, since I have already seen most what the game has to offer between the level 1-80.

I am bring my girlfriend along to the Blade Edge for this purpose. As she takes the responsibility of tanking, I will begin to practice on healing, and for the other roles we are getting three dps terrors from Retribution itself. So it is us five low levels versus the world.

The poor world doesn't stand a chance.

The evening today has passed nicely in modifying my UI again. This time for the purpose of my healer, which calls for some additional pieces of software. Most important of these, of course, is Healbot. Aye, some can argue that it is not necessary for effective play but I found it very useful when last I played on my priest; the ability to point click all my healing spells and saving keyboard bindings for other tasks is extremely precious.

I also installed FuBar for more additional functionality and made modifications to my action buttons, since I have less of them on my priest than death knight. For scrutiny and pleasure of the eye, here is the latest screenshot.