Monthly Archives: September 2009

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” is so overused. Your hip and with-it modern troll gods prefer to extend a friendly word of caution to any would-be adventurers by leaving skeletal remains suspended in mid-air above their shrines. This fairly obvious warning doesn’t seem to be scaring off Plavalaguna of <Light Up the Darkness> on Executus. For mages, +Intellect gear is easy to come by, but I guess it’s more difficult to acquire +Common Sense. Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next! Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, gold seller ads with dead gnomes any race at all, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.

David sent in this submission with a note: “I’m a creative writing major, so naturally, I wanted to write something appealing, engrossing, and overall epic to describe this sweet little shot I snapped during a timed CoS recently. I sat for around 45 minutes staring at my screen, slack-jawed and vacant, before I realized that it wasn’t important, and that this shot, by itself, is more than epic. It almost kind of seems like words might actually ruin it. You know like … these ones. Crap.” Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next! Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, gold seller ads with dead gnomes any race at all, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles

The guild Mediocrity from Blackrock (US) is the second guild in the world to complete the Earth, Wind & Fire achievement. While Vanquish was the first guild to accomplish this special kind of kill, Mediocrity gives us all the gift of a video so that we can share in their achievement. You can see how the team split up the tanking duties, keeping one group on Emalon while the other was stacked up on Archavon and Koralon. This is no small feat, and a clear success of coordination and skill. Congratulations! [Via MMO-Champion]

Gnome mage Fabbin and Thunderfury-wielding warrior Dinghy may have outleveled Tanaris thirty levels ago, but they have yet to figure out how to dress appropriately for a desert environment. Dinghy’s plate gear is cooking him in his own juices — heck, there are even flames coming from his shoulders — and Fabbin is wearing both dark clothing and an uncomfortably warm fire spec. What should they be wearing? Well, we may have just found a use for the Polychromatic Visionwrap. Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next! Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, gold seller ads with dead gnomes any race at all, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.

While video game voice acting never really seems to draw the amazing big names, it’s definitely steadily improving from the old day when it was spare members of the coding team and a couple people pulled off from the street or something. WoW seems to combine the best of both worlds here, in that Warcraft’s Voice acting seems to run the gamut from awesome to pretty decent to painfully over-hammy. Still, to its credit, it’s produced a whole lot of iconic lines, from the first “zug zug” to “You are not prepared” and beyond. With so many iconic phrases, both breath taking and amusing, I’m interested to know what lines of dialogue stick with you and why. Is it the turn of phrase? The delivery? The context in which the line is spoken that adds to the drama or humor? For me, it’s all about Eadric the Pure. Pretty much every line of dialogue he gets in the Trial of the Crusader 5-man is amazing. Well acted, well scripted, with just the right balance between pomposity, noble righteousness and a sort of bemused sense of humor and enjoyment about the whole concept of the Argent Tournament. If I had to pick one line, it would be his final one: “I yield! I submit! Excellent work! May I run away

There are some possible lore spoilers in this one, so we’re pushing it after the break. If you’re not worried about hearing some crazy future lore and enjoy a good laugh at the son of Grom Hellscream, read on. There’s been some speculation lately that Thrall might be moving on to take the mantle of the Guardian of Tirisfal, and that Garrosh Hellscream will instead be given the title of Warchief of the Horde (speculation that’s hinted at by Blizzard as well). But players aren’t necessarily happy with that — while the ingame NPCs of the Horde are bloodthirsty enough to put Garrosh in as their leader, players don’t think his decisions in the past have necessarily been the best. In fact, Vacant on Eldre’thelas has compiled a list of 50 better Warchiefs than Garrosh, and from #5 (Hogger) to #42 (“The login dragon”), it’s one of the funniest things we’ve read on the forums in a while, not to mention a who’s who of pretty meaningless NPCs. When you think that “Sickly Gazelle” would be a better Horde leader than Garrosh, you know that faction’s in trouble. For the benefit of those of you at work and unable to access the forums, we’ve reprinted the top 50 list

My server rarely encounters the Door Boss, but many of you have to deal with the above error on a constant basis. The error originated as a fix for high population realms that had issues with instance lag and crashes. Rather than have you frustrated with problems while in the dungeon, Blizzard decided to put a virtual bouncer at the “door” to keep the load down on the instance servers. While I do think that this was a good idea on Blizzard’s part, I think that they erred greatly by not putting a queue at the “entrance” so that you can do other things while you wait — much like the way Battlegrounds are handled. My friend Joe has to deal with the problem with on his realm and therefore made sure to ask his designated Blizzard representative when he attended the Laguna Art Museum benefit dinner. Producer Carlos Guerrero replied that they needed to upgrade the hardware on the affected realms in order to allow more instances to be launched at the same time. Presumably, that is what the extremely extended downtime was for on Tuesday. So my question to you is, did it work? Are you meeting the Door Boss with the same regularity, or are you able to enter instances more frequently now that your realm has been upgraded?