To avoid upsetting anyone all my beta information is going to be hidden from the main page, So if you want to have content spoiled you will need to click the "read more" link further down the page. The only clue will be from the title of the post but these will, I promise, always be vague enough to not give anything away.

My purpose of playing the beta is to try to break the game, I'm not doing any actual content that I am likely to run Evlyxx, or any of my alts through a kajillion times after the launch. I am here for exploration, looking at the older Azeroth content and to see where I need to go to be able to power level professions.

If you have any requests for places you'd like me to go or NPCs to visit drop me a line at evlyxx at evlyxx dot com or leave me a comment below.
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No, not my total days played, but rather the number of days it took me to clear all raid content in WotLK. Sure I had defeated all bosses before over all of my characters but the Halion kill was on an alt and Evlyxx still needed that kill for me to consider him, and the rest of the WotLK raid content beaten. Sure I still have to kill a few bosses on hard mode (10 and 25) and of course there is the small matter of a 10 man Artard kill, but overall if Cataclysm was launched tomorrow I would have no regrets like I did at the end of vanilla and the Burning Crusade where I was a step away from entering the last raid tier each time.

My self induced progression stress is all now gone, its now fun all the way to Cataclysm, and thats not to say it hasn't been fun to get here! The surprise for me was not the fact that I had finally gotten to the end of the raid content in an expansion, that was my goal this time around all along, but rather the fact that I have got so close not on one alt but 4, Strigimaga my lock is closest with just a Lich King kill eluding the lil gnome, closely followed by the Mikmaq, my shaman, who mises only Lich King and Halion and then comes the mage (Valdaran) and the evil Evlyxx who both need Sindragosa, Lich King and Halion. I'm not going to repeat content from my previous posts about the State of Raiding  but the content wasn't as hard or maybe I just got better and/or surrounded myself with better players.

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To avoid upsetting anyone all my beta information is going to be hidden from the main page, So if you want to have content spoiled you will need to click the "read more" link further down the page. The only clue will be from the title of the post but these will, I promise, always be vague enough to not give anything away.

My purpose of playing the beta is to try to break the game, I'm not doing any actual content that I am likely to run Evlyxx, or any of my alts through a kajillion times after the launch. I am here for exploration, looking at the older Azeroth content and to see where I need to go to be able to power level professions.

If you have any requests for places you'd like me to go or NPCs to visit drop me a line at evlyxx at evlyxx dot com or leave me a comment below.
Read more »

Another day, another round of sifting through the emails.

Is it me or does everyone get 10 spam emails for every 1 genuine one? Of course the fact that I stupidly put my main email address onto the web back in 2001 didn't help my cause. Anyways, with all those lucky people getting beta invites I live in hope of one day finding out that I too have been awarded an invite.

Recently my hopes have been dashed more frequently by hoax e-mails from Bilzzard.com and any other variant of the words Blizzard, cataclysm, beta and battle.net you wish to imagine all claiming that I had been "chosed" for the beta.
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With the saga of ISP issues now behind me, I am back raiding with Immersion, my 25 man raiding guild. In the 5 weeks I've been out of it, the guys and gals have added 2 more hard modes as they have now defeated Blood Princes and Valithria Dreamwalker. Also, Halion was worked on lots and finally defeated and I have yet to have my first tries on this as a healer.

The other big change in the guild was a huge number of new guildies to keep us raiding through the summer, which is usually a period of inactivity, so I'm really happy that this won't be the case for us, so /salute to the officer team. My only concern, is quite selfish as the bulk of the new guys are healers meaning more rotation for the non-officer healers, which is a pain as 2 of the regulars are officers, but I do have the option of dusting down the old shadow skills as the off-set I have built up is plenty good enough, even if I'm not!!

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This weekend my 10 man raid guild decided that the summer was too good to miss and with Cataclysm just around the corner a break was needed for us all to charge our batteries and be fresh for the next wave of challenged.

I must admit I wasn't ready for this myself and the announcement came out of nowhere, but as enough of the group had asked for the break to our raid leader he did exactly as I would have so /salute to Posie for doing that. At the end of the day most of the guys and gals of All about Beer are not hard core progression raider types, their attitude to raiding is very casual and focused on having fun although their drive is first class and that is what made raiding with them worthwhile.

It all started in June 2009 when I got dragged kicking and screaming on an alt into Naxx, I was focusing on my mage as the primary alt at the time and I took my bad DPS into Naxx with a group that was completely unknown to me except for Posie (on his priest), Aphra (who I knew as a mage, Xabinkinniel) and Stabbster (an alt of a guidie, Wollo). The rest where in fresh faced raiders ready to learn their craft in Naxx. It turned out that there were 3 married couples in the team and we had a riot. OK progress was made half the team as we downed Kel'Thuzad and went on to slay Sartharion (with all drakes dead). A top night was had but, I had low expectations about things lasting long. How wrong I was to be!

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Still suffering from Internet issues (good game TalkTalk) I have been unable to raid now for over 4 weeks. My gold making project is going well enough but nothing that really was worth mentioning here. So I decided to go exploring and discovering a few interesting places people rarely visit in-game because they don't know it exists, has no real purpose or is not really meant to serve as anything more than eye-candy on flight paths.

The list is not really long but over the next few weeks I'll be making a post on each of them. Today the location is  Stormwind. Yeah I know what you're thinking EVERYBODY goes to Stormwind, big place, capital city of the humans. Well I shall reveal a tiny part of Stormwind that took me 5 years to find and I thought I'd share with you as it hidden in plain sight!
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I am loving the RealID system. It allows me to to stay in touch with the people I have become friends with online regardless of where they are in WoW. However, the reign of it being the best thing in WoW since the Dungeon Finder  is about to come to a very abrupt end after a very short time.

With the announcement (source) yesterday, that in future forum posts on Blizzard sites will display our full name rather than that of our on screen alter ego, Blizzard seem to have taken the golden egg, covered it in grease and thrown it to Robert Green.

I personally don't want everyone I may encounter to be able to Google me and see what my thoughts on a video game are, sure some people I couldn't careless about them knowing but the guy that in 10 years will want to hire me as a big shot in his multi-million pound enterprise certainly doesn't need access to such ramblings. Therefore, I am now forced into a corner about posting on the forums either I keep quiet and preserve my anonymity or I have my say and risk the whole world finding out my views. Sadly, I'll be choosing the keep quiet option, at least on the Blizzard forums.

Anyways my piece has been said, feel free to post comments below as I'd like to know if I'm being over sensitive or not. more »

Well 25 man content at least. It has now been 3 weeks without a decent enough Internet connection to be able to raid 25 man content, my search for a new ISP has ended, but the pain and suffering caused to me so far has been immense and I hope to have it all sorted, in another week as finally TalkTalk have  accepted that it is not my PC or router at fault and are sending BT Openreach to investigate a possible line fault.

So during this time I have not gained any fresh kills, although Immersion have now killed the Blood Princes HC, good job guys only 5 more to go then Arthas HC! Its been really painful for me as for the best part of  4 years I have had almost 99% attendance for raid nights, infact I have probably missed as many this past 3 weeks as I have (holidays excepted) ever. Hmm maybe I need to get out more. But my raiding needs have been fed from doing the 10 man content with All about Beer and we have made some progress there as we are now 11/12 with only the Lich King left to kill before we embark on 10 man HC.
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I have been suffering a really dodgy connection from my ISP lately, my download is all of 130Kb, which is about 15% of my normal speed. But it has made me appreciate how bad your connection can be ansd how tolerant WoW actually is of this.

Sure it has meant that I am unable to raid ICC on 25 man because even with all the settings to minimum the data flow coming from the servers creates about 1000ms of lag which is just plain bad for attempting complicated fights requiring quick get out of the fire type reactions or the hard mode fights. Dalaran too is a complete nightmare, but you guys already knew that I'm sure.

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In vanilla/classic WoW raiders were hard core players and the game was like a ladder you had to climb step-by-step to get to the top. Getting to 60 was a really epic journey and that took time and people learned their class and how to play the game generally. Once at 60 you farmed the 60 dungeons including Upper Blackrock Spire a 15 (and later 10) man raid zone that had no reset (ie it was like a normal 5 man dungeon) for blue gear that was capable of getting you into Molten Core and not getting your ass handed to you on a plate. There were armor sets for each class too. Once you started raiding there was a clearly defined progress path that really could not be fast tracked. 

The loot was relatively closely itemised so while upgrades for all were available in the latest and greatest there was also upgrades for people in the next tier down. This meant that there was variety in what you were doing each raid and if you had a new recruit who needed gear you were running content that would get them their raid gear.

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I have decided that the time to get actually posting regularly is now, well to be honest, I was poked and prodded and I really was slacking. Trying to get motivated to write about stuff that happened in the past and making it accurate, coherent and relevant was a lot harder than I expected.

Anyways, as things stand now, I am raiding at the top end of the chasing pack, my 25 man guild, Immersion are currently doing hardmodes in ICC 25 mode bosses  which is an OK place to be. I'm with a few friends that I have raided with since MC, Malicus (the pally formerly known as Regaal), Rixxor and Piteq its strange how some folks just can't get rid of me! 

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As a fresh level 60 I knew that the time had come to change from a shadow priest to a holy one. Life outside instances was going to be hard but as a healer I would be able to get into group really easy. The good news was that as soon as I made the change I realised how much easier healing was, bigger heals meant I needed to heal less and that meant my mana lasted most fights instead of having to drink mana potions or drink copiuos amount of Morning Glory Dew constantly. I had done my research and learned that spirit was my best friend and started to collect armour with this stat on. But gearing up as a newly level capped player back in vanilla (level 60) was a very different environment to the one freshly dinged (or should that be dung?) level 80 has now (patch 3.3.3 May 2010). 


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The day I hit level 50 was the day Shadowsong EU opened the gates of Ahn'Qiraj. Knowing a few people in the know I got the tip that it was happening at 6am server time on a Saturday morning to hopefully avoid the server crashes that followed the attempt to bang the gong.

Masses of people were there to watch and then the inevitable disconnect and when trying to log back in getting the world server is down message. This fiasco went on for an hour but eventually things stabilised and the ceremony went ahead and the gates opened.

I was still 10 levels away from being able to join the end game raiders who went their way downing the one-off world bosses and onto the 2 raid instances, The Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj a 20 man raid and the 40 man raid The Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. It would be quite some time before I went there but there was still plenty of content for the non-raiders to get their teeth into to save Azeroth from the bug invasion!

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