2fps

The date on my hosting expiration rolled over on the 9th. Rolled over by a year. Turns out I dramatically underestimated how much time I had purchased last year and I’m actually good to go for another 12 months!

So what does this mean for you?

Well it means 2fps will still be here for another year.

What does this mean for me?

It means I’m still going to cut back on the blogging for a while but it also means my absence will be a temporary one.

I’m going to make this a month long break which means 2fps will resume activity on August 17th (or so, kinda, maybe).

Tune in again next month!

Way back in the fading twilight of the Burning Crusade I decided I had had enough with the bullshit that characterized the raiding guilds I had seen and resolved to start a new guild. There were a few important keystones for the guild:

• People-focused – No more putting up with sorry excuses for human beings just so we could fill out a raid. If I’m going to spend this much time with you I had better like doing it. One of the talking points we had in the beginning was that we’d rather not raid at all than raid with people we hated.
• Interested – If you joined our guild we wanted you to be interested in the game and how it worked. The original members all enjoyed the frequent nerd talk about spell coefficients, ideal haste/crit balances, etc. We didn’t want to have to tell someone every little thing about everything about how to play simply because someone couldn’t be bothered to care on their own to find out.
• Progression-oriented – In Burning Crusade, this meant something a little different than it does now. Unless you were in one of the premiere guilds on your server you probably didn’t see a lot of endgame raiding content. I was lucky enough to clear everything but Sunwell. The guild I was in at the time of clearing Black Temple and Hyjal was just too horrible and toxic and repugnant to make me want to endure it for one last raid instance, otherwise I would have seen all that BC had to offer. With that idea in mind, we resolved that our guild was going to reach the end. Most the original members again had either cleared everything up to Sunwell or had cleared Sunwell too and we weren’t keen on stalling in Wrath’s Kara equivalent. We were going to see Arthas dead.

Its been a long trip from telling jokes over Vent to try and keep awake during the first phase of the Kel’thuzad encounter to screaming DEFILE IN 5 DEFILE IN 5 DEFILE IN 5 over Mumble but to a great degree, I feel like Nocturne stayed true to its original intent.

I’m waxing nostalgic for a point (this time). Last night, Nocturne downed Arthas for the first time. For so long, this was the benchmark I personally held as a sort of litmus test for the success of the ideas behind the founding of this guild. We had always been lucky in that we raided with friends and that overwhelmingly we were all geeks about knowing stuff about the game. Could we do it all?

Turns out yes, yes we could.

This is the culmination of over a year’s worth of effort and hard work and I know I for one am feeling pretty good about it.

So where does that leave us now? This is certainly the end of a long story. However, Nocturne will continue. We’ll roll Halion over and get excited over the Cataclysm development and when Deathwing pops up and the world breaks we’ll get to work starting all over again.

Some things are done and over though. My hosting for this site expires in, oh about two days. I’m going to take this moment of achievement and completion to hang up my blogging hat. Its conceivable that I’ll pick it up again in the future but for now I’d just like to say thank you for reading.

Suffer well.

What’s the one thing that would prompt me to post again in spite of the fact that I’m swamped busy with schoolwork and other real life obligations at the moment? OH YEAH THE CATACLYSM BETA IS OPEN. All that crying and moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth over new abilities, talents and configurations?

Let it all out and don’t stop throwing tantrums until Cataclysm goes live!

I’ve been looking over some of the new information on Mmochamp and I’m both annoyed and satisfied with quite a lot of the talent restructuring for Death Knights so far. The Blood tree, and it also looks like Blood presence, is shouldering all the tanking responsibility as previously announced. One thing I wanted to make particular note of is the way they’re really pushing hard to make you choose between good talents. Naturally, after that I’ll post the disjointed word vomit that constitutes the rest of my initial reactions to the changes.

Choices choices choices!

Blizz has been saying they want to make us choose between good talents for a while now and from the looks of the beta talent trees they’re off to a good start.

Suppose you’re a Death Knight tank and you’ve spent most your talent points in Blood and are now looking for things in Frost and Unholy to pick up. We’ll assume you’ve spent 57 points in Blood and that your build now looks something like this.

So what next?

Personally, I really have a hard time living in a world where I know I can’t drop DnD every 20 seconds or so. Do I ever actually do that? Of course not but its nice to know that if I need to drop DnD for whatever reason I’m not going to be limited by its innately long cooldown. Ok, so I want Morbidity. Uh oh, its pretty deep in Unholy now. Well, I suck it up and spec for it anyway because I value it just that much and now my talents look like this.

Huh, only one talent point left! But I wanted to make my Icy Touch hit harder and I wanted to pick up Runic Empowerment! Tough.

Now the theorycrafting may end up saying that Runic Empowerment is as much a staple as Sanguine Fortitude but that isn’t the point right now. I want Runic Empowerment. I want Morbidity. I can only have one. This feels like an interesting decision to have to make.

I’m looking forward to seeing how these talent trees evolve in the coming months.

Word vomit

• Hysteria is called Unholy Frenzy and is on the third tier of Unholy now. Still able to be picked up by tanks, still handy to have around.
• Sudden Doom lost to deeeeeeeeep Unholy. Also reverted back to just making your next Death Coil free, not automatically launching one for you. Another button to push when your runes are down likely.
• No cost to activate Icebound Fortitude again, yay!
• Vendetta, now called Exsanguinate, moved to tier one of Blood. Has anyone ever taken this ever? Surprised its still kicking around.
• Dancing Rune Weapon gives 20% extra Parry chance now. On the fence about this one. Perhaps I’m still locked into the historical mindset of Parry being mostly garbage but I was hoping for a little bit more from the reworked 51 point talent.
• Magic Suppression/Anti-magic Zone still in Unholy. I’m being entirely greedy with this but uh… can Blood get those instead? We’ll trade you uh… Blood Parasites and um… Exsanguination!
• On a Pale Horse retains its mounted movement speed increase thus ensuring its place as my leveling tree for the second expansion in a row.
• Pillar of Frost sits on the fifth tier of Frost and prevents you from being knocked back and boosts your Strength by 20%. No knockbacks for 20 seconds, nice!
• Lichborne unchanged, still stupid.
• You can still kinda make a really super ghetto Frost or Unholy tank spec but only kinda… kinda. Not that I recommend those sorts of shenanigans of course.

This is roughly the one year anniversary of my first New Rules post. Crazy.

New Rule – Death to immunities

Remember how immunities were all the rage in vanilla and BC? Rag, Hydross, Curator, etc. all had immunities to certain schools of magic. This was fitting lore-wise but frustrating to play against. If you wanted to spec for Fire or Arcane or whatever you basically got a kick in the teeth on these types of fights. Heaven help you if you were a shaman farming the Elemental Plateau. There was even talk of having Sapphiron be immune to frost magic in the remake of Naxxramas for WotLK.

Then Blizzard decided to basically shelve the whole terrible concept and never use it again.

If only…

Ahune’s back and he’s as annoying as ever. All the adds are immune to frost making it very irritating to round them all up. Its not difficult, its just irritating to have Icy Touch essentially yanked out of my spellbook.

New Rule – Moar soulsssssss

Nocturne recently teamed up with another 10man raiding team to have a go at some 25man ICC. The raid went very well and the Nocturne folk cleaned up loot-wise. Zen finally got a new shield, Zarat got the Nibelung he’s been lusting for and I didn’t do so bad myself.

I got the drops from Festergut and Rotface that I needed for Shadow’s Edge. In anticipation for this, I had been hoarding primordial saronite for a while so that the moment we were done raiding I’d be able to get my new weapon.

Now its time to feed a thousand souls to the axe.

New Rule – No more capitalism please

As I mentioned above, I’ve been hoarding primordial saronite. Even with 7 80’s all running daily heroics for purchasing saronite I still felt like I wasn’t making progress quick enough so I did something that I do my best to avoid: I started using the auction house.

I have every profession maxed out between all my alts. I basically have a license to print money if I want. The thing is, playing the auction game bores me senseless and I absolutely loathe waiting around for auctions to sell. The interface for creating auctions is also pretty clunky although its better now than ever before.

But I needed saronite so I sucked it up and posted auctions for about twelve cut epic gems. I didn’t really want to do the research on which cuts were selling best so I just threw up a variety of a few I knew would be popular. I didn’t count on the Solid Majestic Zircon being my chief moneymaker but it didn’t take long for me to get the message. Every Solid cut I posted would get snatched up in minutes. By the end of the first day of auctioneering I had made somewhere near 10k gold from gems alone.

I could easily keep doing this. I could branch out into other markets as well. I could hit the gold cap, finance epic flying for all of my alts and do all the other things crazy rich people do. Thing is, its possibly the least fun thing I can think of to do in WoW. Therefore, a pauper I shall remain.

New Rule – We’re here to see the wizard, let us in!

This new contest for guilds to win Cata beta invites has been weighing on my mind since the second I found out about it (thanks J). I sent off the official email on behalf of myself and Nocturne within an hour of reading the rules and now its just a waiting game I suppose.

I haven’t been in oodles of game beta versions before but the WotLK beta was one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced in this or any other video game. I liked the rapidly evolving environment, the sense of pioneering the unknown and helping guide the direction of the game.

I’m one of those people that likes to thoroughly research something before I jump in and do it. I pugged Naxx on a number of different toons in the Beta so I could have a leg up on knowing what to do when the expansion went live. I like, and actually need, to be able to have some kind of experience with a raid fight before I can start to formulate a workable strategy.

Ask Zindo what it was like for me trying to come up with a simple strategy for the Blood Princes before I’d done anything except read the list of abilities the bosses would use. Deer in the headlights man, deer in the headlights.

So I’ve put on my ruby slippers and I’m taking my guildies and we’re metaphorically off to see if we can get in to see the wizard for Cataclysm.

Yes, the trip is metaphorical, my ruby slippers are not. Be jealous.

I posted recently about a positive relationship that was mostly formed within the context of WoW. Today, I’d like to post about another WoW relationship.

Her character’s name was Mayfair. She came to our guild with her boyfriend with whom she was living and immediately became the darling of the guild. She was born in London, grew up in South Africa and had moved to the States in the last few years. She had a charming, intoxicating accent and was exuberantly friendly.

She and I hit it off immediately. We compared opinions on the best roleplay outfits in WoW, what style high heels we liked in real life, and why we both played Warcraft. She was understanding, intelligent, witty and unfailingly kind throughout our discourse. She feigned reluctance to speak in vent for a short time but quickly stole the mic as it were from everyone else. She enraptured the men of the guild by doing a spot-on impression of Lois Griffin from Family Guy and by being juuuuuust slightly flirtatious. Tasteful of course but flirtatious.

I became good friends with her because she understood the massive problems the guild had lurking beneath the surface. Favortism, ignorance, cliques, etc. She understood everything. The problems I had only discovered after months of thought and experience she picked up on almost immediately. She had a gift for perception.

We stayed up late many nights on ventrilo where she would listen to the rantings I had against the guild, against the injustices I perceived and she was nothing but encouraging when I talked about crazy ideas like starting my own guild. She was as good a friend as any.

After I left that guild I stayed in touch with her. Not long afterwards, she and one of our other mutual friends left the guild as well under bad circumstances. I asked if she had any interest in helping me form a new guild like we had always talked about but she was reticent for a reason I couldn’t fathom. I also didn’t fully understand why she was clinging to this other mutual friend with whom she had left the guild.

It didn’t matter to me, I only wanted her to be happy as she played. We stayed in contact for a while but our relationship fizzled slowly over time. I always wondered what had happened to her after I lost contact with her when it appeared she no longer played the game.

Fast forward a year and a half.

A few friends from that same guild Mayfair and I had both left so long ago suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I was happy to rediscover them and asked how Mayfair was doing and that’s when I learned the truth about her.

She was a con artist.

She wasn’t from London, probably hadn’t ever been to South Africa. She had stolen thousands of dollars from the boyfriend she was with when I first met her and had run away with the mutual friend with whom she left the guild at the end of the Burning Crusade. No doubt he too had fallen under her siren song and would be exploited, stolen from and abandoned. This was not the first, nor would it be the last time that this woman had assumed an identity with the ultimate goal to rob, steal and plunder.

I can’t help but wonder how much of my relationship with her was false. Its obviously best to assume it was all false, that she was always playing a game with me. Still, we spent many nights talking about things that I guess really only mattered to me. It was her constant reassurance that gave me the resolve to eventually form Nocturne some time later. She didn’t get anything out of those late night, private discussions. I know she was probably assessing whether or not I had anything she wanted but still, her guile and her illusions were so perfect that even now that I know exactly what she is I still can’t help but fall for them a tiny bit.

She’s still out there somewhere and while I feel sympathy for her victims past and present I still can’t help but be grateful that I knew her.

She’s very, very, very good at what she does.

Guys, I have but one thing to say to you all today and it is this:

STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING

Yes, MMOChamp has “new” talent trees out so what do 99% of people seemingly think of this?

OMG THAT’S WHAT THE CATA TREES ARE GOING TO BE LIKE!!1

I’m baffled. This is not a new process that Blizzard has when it comes to developing talent trees. They start with a baseline, in our case that baseline is the existing talent trees currently live in WotLK, and then they iterate on that baseline THROUGHOUT THE ALPHA, BETA AND THE LIVE EXPANSION ITSELF.

The idea that these are “finished” talent trees or even mostly complete talent trees is ludicrous. They’re giving us an idea of how things are shaping in the alpha at the moment, that’s pretty much all. Remember that post I did a while back about the history and evolution of the Death Knight class? Of course not because you didn’t read it. That’s ok, I’ll go over the gist of it again.

This is what the talent trees looked like for Death Knights during the WotLK alpha.

This is what the talent trees looked like for Death Knights during the WotLK beta.

This is what the talent trees look like for Death Knights currently.

Do you get it? There’s a lot of changes between those three setups and there were many more changes in between them too. This is the process that ALL classes are going to be put through in the months ahead.

Stop assuming these new talent trees are anything close to what you’re going to see the first day of Cata. They’re not. At the moment they’re pretty roughshod with only minor initial changes. THESE TALENT TREES ARE GOING TO CHANGE DRASTICALLY. So drastically, all your conclusions about what you’re seeing right now will be completely irrelevant.

Really, all this shows us is how much work they have yet to do to get Cata ready for even the beta testing.

You’re getting a look at an evolving organism. Don’t mistake it for anything else.

I’ve debated about making this post for months. Despite all the things I put on Twitter I’m not actually super interested in talking about certain details of my personal life. However, this is a topic I feel is relevant to my readers and is a perspective that I simply don’t see presented very often at all.

Its likely you’ve heard the term “wow-widows” or some such variant. Its a term couched in the context of unhappy marriages, neglect and misguided priorities. The stereotype is that some slovenly husband is hunched over the keyboard late at night while his nagging wife berates him for spending more time on a video game than on their relationship.

I’d like to offer a personal story that explains why I reject this notion of video games as the great destroyer of families because for me, video games have done more for my relationship with my family than anything else.

In the beginning

A little background info here on my family. My brothers and I didn’t get along very well when we were growing up. In fact, nobody in the family got along with anybody else in the family very well. There were better times and worse times of course but we were all very different people. We didn’t talk about our feelings, we didn’t share interests. We had brutal fights from time to time. There are a number of different memories I have of things that we did to each other that make me deeply ashamed and regretful even today.

One day my brother expressed an interest in World of Warcraft. I was very surprised as he typically isn’t the kind of person who plays a lot of video games and the ones he does play are all sports related. I never would have imagined he’d be interested in playing a game with elves and magic and swords.

A short time later I beat him to the punch and bought a copy of the game with the Burning Crusade expansion. My brother came home and saw me playing and got really excited. He picked up the game a week later and started playing on a different server.

It was odd. We had something to talk about now. Over the course of the next three years we became closer than I’d ever imagined possible and it was directly because of WoW.

Tuesday mornings and big frickin’ deals

He made the decision to jump to my server early on after hearing about some of the things I was discovering, primarily endgame raiding. We ended up in the same guilds, splitting to different guilds, basically weaving our playing experience together and apart for as long as we both played.

We’d spend a lot of Tuesday mornings talking about raiding or pvp or the math behind rogue dps while waiting for the weekly maintenance to finish up. I could usually tell when he was pvping because I could hear him shouting and cackling at his victims from down the hall. We teamed up and made a 2v2 arena team with his rogue and mine. He was always much better at roguery than I was.

As I mentioned, we were sometimes in the same guild. Whenever I was healing I’d make it a special point to keep him topped off as best I could regardless of what my actual assignment was. If we wiped he’d impatiently demand a rezz and I’d willingly put up with the way he was completely oblivious to the focused healer attention he was getting.

I was really proud of him when he got into what was then the top raiding guild on our side of the server. He was doing Black Temple on his first night in the guild and I watched as much as I could before having to go to my own Karazhan raid. This was a big frickin’ deal to be in Black Temple. After his raid was over I checked the damage meters from the WoW Web Stats report and was very impressed to see that he topped the charts on Teron Gorefiend. Also a big frickin’ deal as you can gather if you’ve ever done that fight. Not only did he top charts his first time in, he topped them against players who had been learning the content weeks before him.

It wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows of course. We needed some measure of distance from each other even when playing the game. We were better off in different guilds not raiding together for the most part. Arguments tended to crop up if we were in too close quarters. Our 2’s arena team for example provoked a good share of heated arguing.

“You were supposed to blind the priest, what the hell were you doing?”

“I was?! No, you were but you were too busy tunnel-visioning on the other rogue.”

“Shut up, you suck! Ffs kick kick KIIIIIIICCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK.”

I think we did a good job finding our balance however and we stuck to it for the most part.

Sometimes talking about WoW led us to talk about other things going on in our real lives. I learned that he could be subject to the same bleak, hopeless outlooks on life that I’m prone too, something that we would never have talked about before WoW and is something we’ve never seriously talked about since even.

Archie

The most memorable time we had raiding together was the Archimonde fight. His guild had been bashing their heads against the wall for what seemed like decades trying to get that fight down. I was asked to come help on my mage because the raid leader trusted me not to stand in doomfire so I was there on the night they finally got their kill. It was one of those classic raid nights where everything came down to the wire. It was very near the end of the raid and people were desperate to not have to come back again and start over.

At around 25% things started to get out of control. I ran out of range of people needing to be decursed and so did one of the other decursers. Two people died which led to a horrible chain reaction of more people dying. I could hear my brother smashing the hell out of his gamepad from down the hall, frantically trying to squeeze out as many Sinister Strikes as he could and I didn’t need to see him to know that he was leaning so far forward towards the screen that he was in danger of falling out of his chair or that his teeth were gritted and the last time he blinked was minutes and minutes in the past.

When Archimonde kersploded he started jumping on the furniture in his room while shouting and cheering as loud as he could. He then burst into my room and started jumping on my furniture. There hadn’t been this much celebrating since the Utah Jazz made it into the NBA Finals.

The point

Here’s the point: I liked this. I liked watching him blow people up at the Gold Mine or having him explain to me his new personal rules for enjoying Warsong Gulch (the rule was he only ever killed other rogues). I liked having this world that we shared. It wasn’t the best relationship ever but it was the best we’d ever had. I never cared about the loot that I got nearly as much as I cared about what loot he got. I was proud of everything he accomplished much more than I was proud of my own achievements. Things were just… good.

And then he got a new girlfriend. One he was quite serious about. She laid down a ground rule with him pretty early on: WoW destroys families and he wasn’t to continue playing. At first he’d sneak a bit but it didn’t take much time at all for things to change.

He doesn’t play anymore. We also don’t talk much anymore. We’re both doing different things, living in different places further away, etc. Things are still good between us but very much… inactive.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bitter towards this girl for being so ignorant. She will never understand that her prejudiced ultimatum was the catalyst that effectively cut the legs out from under the best relationship I ever had with someone from my family.

I’ve tried writing a good ending to this post for over a week now and every time I get to this point I falter. Therefore, I’ll simply leave this post with as unsatisfying an ending as my brother’s WoW career.

New Rule – We’re here too

Remember when the blue posts were flying on MMOChampion about how exciting the loot was going to be from the Ruby Sanctum with particular emphasis on trinkets?

Turns out that was a bunch of crap that only applied to fake 25man raiders. The 10man loot table is just beyond atrocious so far. As far as we know at the moment, only one tank item drops in 10man mode and it covers the boot slot of all places. There are no trinkets listed as dropping in 10man mode.

There had damn well better be some stuff we don’t know about yet because despite what anyone else thinks, strict 10man raiders are here too.

New Rule – Go Holy or GTFO

Way back in BC when my guild was faltering on Gurtogg Bloodboil I talked to the healing lead about possibly speccing into a deep Disc build for Pain Suppressioning our clothies on the Fel Rage. I campaigned hard for the viability, if only situational, of a full Disc healer. Of course, nothing came of it because Holy was such a powerhouse by comparison.

Wrath launched and it seemed like Blizzard was listening to my stump speeches because Disc suddenly blossomed into a real true healing spec competitive not just with its Holy counterpart, but with any other healing spec from any other class as well.

The unfortunate fallout of this otherwise awesome turn of events is that so many priests have completely forsaken Holy altogether. To paraphrase one of my Nocturne guildies, it seems as if the Holy spec molested every priest in BC so people have sworn to never have anything to do with it again.

Here’s the thing: despite your objections and your hot displeasure, Holy actually is a great healing spec with a ton of awesome tools to bring to the table and you’re only gimping yourself and possibly your raid by sticking with vehement denials.

I campaigned for Disc back when nobody would touch it with a ten foot pole, I’ll do it again for Holy now!

New Rule – We’re smelting all other armor pieces to make new shields

When WotLK launched, warrior and paladin tanks were given a healthy variety of shields to choose from. There were no less than three item level 200 shields outside of raids with more shields coming from Naxx and Malygos. Awesome. One might even say it was a bit overkill.

As far as healer shields went things weren’t quite as rosy but were still pretty ok. There was one available with badges and at the time, we hadn’t figured out that mp5 was complete shit so we didn’t quite so much mind that the shield had that stat. There was also one off of Maexxna which was a reasonably killable boss.

Ulduar introduced two more tank shield and two more caster shields, one of each from hard mode Hodir. ToC gave us one more tank shield from a hard mode and one more caster shield. Now Icecrown offers one more tank shield and one more caster shield. The caster shield drops off of Sindragosa, not exactly one of the most accessible bosses in the zone.

Note that almost all the caster shields listed have mp5, by and large a completely wasted stat. The itemization seems to tell elemental shaman in particular to bugger off.

Yet two more shields were added in the Icecrown 5mans but these are both on the item level 219 scale and again the caster shield has mp5.

This sounds like a lot of variety on paper but really your options are pretty limited. You get the shield out of the 5mans on your own or you try and form a group for ToC. Its still too early for most people to start counting on getting a shield off Sindy if you’re a caster.

So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take the glut of item level 200 shields and all dps mail because I’m sick of seeing it and we’re smelting it all down to make new, better, more accessible shields. Pare down the unnecessary options for entry level tanks and throw us a bone at the higher end of the spectrum. I’m sure this is something that the elemental shammies will back me up on at least.

Continuing on a theme of numbered lists, I present to you nine reasons why Silvermoon is the best city in Azeroth. Don’t get the wrong idea though, there are lots more reasons that I could have included but I didn’t want to blow your mind with the sheer breadth of Silvermoon’s awesomeness all at once. In fact, I couldn’t do that even if I tried because technically, they haven’t even finished rebuilding all of Silvermoon. That is how badass the city is: its horribly maimed and scarred and still looks better than Orgrimmar, Stormwind, Ironforge, Undercity and other cities-no-one-ever-goes-to combined!

9. Fabulous architecture

Unlike our other Horde allies, blood elves actually have a city made out of modern building supplies. Correction, we have a city made out of modern building supplies that we didn’t steal from humans.

We have two auction houses and this is the ghetto one. 

Thunder Bluff is made out of mostly painted popsicle sticks and twine, Orgrimmar is built out of mud and bone and what we hope is a chemical byproduct from the nearby oil spill run by British Petroleum the Venture Company and the Undercity was built by the Scourge so it looks just like Naxxramas and we hate Naxxramas. Also, lol at trolls.

8. You never have to work

We have magic brooms that do the sweeping for us, arcane robots that police the streets and best of all, we have a semi-secret army of leper gnomes who willingly devote their lives to the glory of Quel’thalas.

 They asked to be kept in cages and shackles, honest. They can get out any time they want.

If you do want to work, you can be employed as a palace guard, prostitute, barkeep, or… if you’re really gross you could risk getting your hair sweaty and do… manual labor.

Fortunately there’s only one dude in the city crazy enough for manual labor. 

7. No public drinking laws

How many times has this happened to you: you’ve spent all night partying with your friends slumming it up in Orgrimmar and while passed out, some barbarian orc parade carrying a giant dragon head tramples you into the dirt.

Or this scenario: Completely smashed and acting on the dare of a close friend, you spend the night with a Forsaken call girl and wake up embraced in the rotting arms of a mutilated corpse. Also, she says she really enjoyed last night and what is it you do for a living again?

Horrifying right? No need to worry about that in Silvermoon! Blood Elves are quite used to various states of drugged stupor and inebriation. We’re very understanding if you suddenly stumble over to the gutter and sleep your mana withdrawals away. In fact, if its cold out, huddle up with a stranger and you’ll ensure a safe and undisturbed night of sleep!

Hey baby is that a sword or are you just… oh gosh no its a sword and you’re definitely stabbing me. 

6. Enchanting brothels

Remember I mentioned Forsaken callgirls a moment ago? Stop, don’t remember them. Some things are best not imagined.

We understand that when you solicit a prostitute you’re not seeking a horrifying glimpse into the disfigured grinning visage of death. Silvermoon prides itself on the fittest, most attractive call girls and rent boys in Azeroth. Our brothels are richly adorned pleasure centers where, for a modest fee, you can enjoy the latest moves in mailbox-dancing, engage in polyamorous adventures with imps, succubi and felhunters and of course, indulge in erotic asphyxiation with willing participants.

See what happens when you don’t use a safe word kids? 

5. Silvermoon has scars

This is one is pretty self-explanatory. Half the city was destroyed by the Scourge a while back, leaving a smoking black swath of disease and decay through the middle of Silvermoon. This is totally ok though because chicks dig scars right?

Yeah, chicks dig this.

4. Free recreational drugs

One of the best parts of Blood Elf society is the liberal attitudes towards recreational drugs. I mean, hey we’re all dealing with the horrible withdrawals from our arcane magic addiction so why not be cool about it if someone starts siphoning the life force out of some magical sentient being right? You can find these things all over the city, conveniently located next to lounge mats, hookahs, and the finest literature ever penned by Alistair Crowley.

Dude, I’m so high. Are you glowing? Haha. Gloooooowiiiiing. 

3. Cultural diversity

Taking pot shots at other cultures and people is fun and all but really, we totally embrace the lifestyles and rich heritages of our Horde allies. Look, we even keep our own druid around!

She totally gets our drug culture. 

But uh… well look. Sometimes we like to get together in the streets for spontaneous celebrations of our… cultural heritage. You shouldn’t come to these gatherings if you’re not a Blood Elf. Its not that you’re not welcome its just… well look it would be awkward for all of us so let’s just be cool ok?

Pictured: non-offensive celebrations of Blood Elf culture. Nothing racist here. 

2. Mu’ru

Once upon a time we were all like… omg this dead scar sucks I wish we had houses and hookers again. Then our badass Prince was like, oh snap I totally have just the thing! So he went out to Outland and found a giant windchime made out of energy and convinced it to help us out by letting us use its energy to satiate our magic withdrawals, power our brooms and perk up the… ears of our prostitutes. Things are totally rad with Mu’ru here lighting up the city like christmas ornament, giving us the ability to be sweet paladins and… wait…

That drunk guy had better not have lost Mu’ru. 

Ok… if I’m reading this right then some jackass broke into the city that’s guarded by a billion robots and killer brooms and stole our giant glowing windchime? Wtf man. Whoever did that is a bastard.

1. Prince Kael’thas

This is the guy who makes it all happen. The robots, the buildings, the guards, the wealth, the drugs, the leisure time, this is the guy that makes it all possible. He flies through the air on a bird that is literally made of fire. He can burn your face off by thinking it. He singlehandedly restored order and purpose to the Blood Elves after nearly singlehandedly saving our entire race from mass slaughter at the hands of the Alliance. There is nothing Blood Elves do not owe this dude and he’s totally our prin-

Not pictured or even found in Silvermoon: the most badass leader of anyone ever, Prince Kael’thas.

Wait, seriously? You’ve got to be shitting me. Who the hell are the Scryers? They’re saying what now? Oh come on! That’s so ridiculous!

Oh ffs people he’s… its Kael!

DAMN YOU BLIZZARD!

Earlier this week I listed the five worst raid instance entrances. Today, I cover the five best!

5. Magister’s Terrace

I’m totally biased towards all things Blood Elf, deal with it. However this actually does merit a spot on the list on its own! You may not recall but the Isle of Quel’Danas was a progressive event zone. The island started out under the control of enemy forces and it was only through slow, steady work did we capture the island.

In those first days if you wanted to run Magister’s Terrace you were besieged by baddies the minute you stepped off the boat. You had to battle your way up the hill to the stone fending off some particularly nasty mobs that tended to group up on you. Eventually, we wrested control of a path through to the Terrace and yet later, the whole island.

4. Stockades

The instance itself is pretty much good for nothing but wool-farming but it has a pretty awesome entrance. The Stockades are near the dead center of Stormwind and serves as the city’s prison. The bad news is that the prison has erupted into violence and now the prisoners run the Stockades. The Alliance police forces are all right outside the instance entrance in full armor, preparing for the flood of inmates to come pouring out of the gates. The police forces have stacked up crates and barricades like a mini-fortress and are all shouting at one other very dramatically. Mostly what they shout goes something like “OMG WHY IS NO ONE STOPPING TO HELP US HERE FFS. WHERE’S VARIAN, THIS IS A FULL ON PRISON RIOT OMG WHY IS THIS STILL HAPPENING”.

Prison riots are badass.

3. Coilfang Reservoir

How many instances do you get to by swimming out into the middle of a giant lake, diving down through a twisting drain pipe and emerging in a giant waterfall? Pretty sure its not more than four! The shared instance hub for the Slave Pens, Underbog, Steamvaults and the famed Serpentshrine Cavern is easily one of the coolest entrances.

I wasn’t aware that the giant waterfall was anything more than just that for the longest time. Then someone formed a raid with me to show me what it really was. If you’re in a raid and you approach the waterfall you’ll hear a rumbling sound as the walls behind the falls pull back to reveal Serpentshrine Caverns.

2. Deadmines

Westfall is a shitty zone. A lot of the quests are boring, the scenery is drab and everything pretty much feels like the Grapes of Wrath there and John Steinbeck can eat a dick.

Oh yeah, its also home to an underground hideout of thieves who live on a boat in the middle of some inexplicable body of water. Nice!

The perfect place for boating! 

The entrance is entirely unassuming. A modest rickety shack holds a series of descents until you reach the mines themselves. Still, a noxious old mine seems to fit right in here. Press on however and you’ll eventually be swashbuckling with pirates and parrots on an oceanliner. Well played Westfall, well played.

1. Ahn’Qiraj

This instance entrance used to simply be a giant middle finger that said “Yeah there’s a couple raids behind this door but screw you”. That apparently pissed off a lot of people so the Horde and Alliance both worked together in the most shitty of shitty zones doing some pretty lame quests so that one day, one lucky douchebag could shaft everyone else who helped and claim a unique title and one of the rarest mounts in the game.

But that’s not all. Once the gates were opened you found yourself staring at the toes of some giant Anubis-like statues that came to life and started to nom your face off. The process of opening the gates of Ahn’Qiraj had widespread consequences that effected pretty much everyone and their dog across all of Azeroth.

In fact, the gates of Ahn’Qiraj were so epic that Blizzard said “Whoa guys we can’t in good conscience submit any more people to the sheer awesomeness of opening the Ahn’Qiraj gates anymore so from now on they’re going to start as opened on all servers!”

When the gates were opened on Moon Guard, I was there and I was one of the first tanks to get smacked up by Kurinaxx and I SMOTE HIS RUIN UPON THE MOUNTAINSIDE.

But when he didn’t drop the pretty robes I wanted I said it was a lame place and hearthed.