((This is the first half of my recent entry into Blizzard’s Creative Writing contest. I put only the first part up for now because of the length. Bear in mind I had to rush this a bit, as I only found out about the contest about 3 days before it ended, so some descriptions are a bit underdone, etc etc. More to come soon though, perhaps!))

There are people who believe that whenever we begin a significant journey in our lives, the outcome of that journey is predetermined before you even embark upon it. Some choose to call it fate, or destiny, while to others such results may appear as only a series of coincidences, a myriad of intertwining choices and possibilities, all affecting certain lives in certain ways. Most wise men know that even the gods and goddesses of this realm have little or no control over this chaos, although many of the deities try their hand at changing certain pathways, attempting like so many before them to control, through subtle guidance of a mortal being.

The god-touched, while often becoming prominent amongst their peers, very rarely know who they are, although a few figures stand out in our world’s history. The High Priestess Tyrande Whisperwind is one obvious choice at least, whose relationship with the gods surpassed a mere worshipper during the First Great War. Dare I mention Thrall, or even Arthas? Their paths are surely what those people who believe such things would call ‘fate’.

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So to our rather significant surprise we woke up today to discover that the patch would be hitting no later than tomorrow. Everyone was rather giddy as expected – everyone, except one person.

Our dear mage Vredens was missing the And They Would All Go Down Together achievement from the 4 Horsemen encounter. As you might know, that achievement is a rather trivial to accomplish requirement to completing the Glory of the Raider meta-achievement which awards a very nice mount, and it was the last achievement Vredens was missing.

The only problem here was that once the patch hit this reward would no longer be available, and to make matters complicated, Vredens wasn’t supposed to be able to play today and none of us has been able to make contact with him all day long.

Clearly though – such petty details do not deter the valiant cold and hungry raiders of THC. Argha took the initiative and at the early afternoon organized a raid to be on standby in case Vredens shows up. I tried to e-mail him to let him know we were here and waiting in case he checks his mail. The hours crept on though and hope was slowly diminishing. Some people gave up but still could not bring themselves to logoff.

Finally! At 2AM sharp, one hour before the servers were scheduled to reset, he came online. Quickly the raid was set up, people relogged from alts, scrambled to respec, made scrolls to cover for missing buffs, flew off to summon and started clearing trash.

Bosses fell left and then right, and with 20 minutes left on the clock we stood before the 4 Horsemen – *BOOM* *GRRRR* *PEWPEW* *AHHHH!!!* *HAEL!!!* *ZERG!!* – and they were all dead. Operation “Lazyass Troll” was thus complete.

Grats Vredens, and thanks to everyone that stuck around for a fun and crazy way of saying goodbye to T7 content.

As he looked around the battlefield the large Tauren couldn’t escape a grim smile as he looked upon the corpses of the four dragons and their minions. As he turned away from the bloody mess he had help create he smiled broadly at his companions. Most of them resting from the heavy battle. A few fellow Tauren licking their wounds, the healers taking care of the more critically wounded. It pleased the big tauren to see that he and his friends had lived through another challenge. As he thought about the challenges ahead he walked towards the quick campfire that had been created, thinking about the road that took him there.

Only a few months before that fight the cold dark embrace of death I had felt for so long had suddenly lifted. As I came into consciousness I heard whispers in my head, a strong voice giving me directions. Telling me to slaughter innocents, to murder everyone. Without regret, sorrow or hesitation I followed orders until one day… nothing. No voice, no orders, no directions. As I strolled around Acherus he noticed more people in confusion, and then a strong presence entered the room telling us were were free, given us instructions to pledge allegiance to our new leaders.

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I’m one of those people who thinks it’s fun to farm old artifacts from outdated content. My fellow guild leader Anubelle is another. We’ve been farming stuff like the Zul’Gurub mounts and the bindings in Molten Core for a while now.

Between us we have both a tiger (Anubelle) and a raptor (Jomotei), but we haven’t had much luck with mounts since that magical reset all those weeks ago when those two dropped in the same run. However, in order to increase our odds, and given our jump from level 70 to 80, we’ve recently expanded our expeditions to include Sethekk Halls for the Raven Lord mount and Magister’s Terrace for the big white chicken.

Well, given that I’m now writing a blog post, you’re probably suspecting that something dropped. It’s either that or a whine about an unmatched streak of frustration. You know what, maybe it can be both! Yes, I will start off with a whine.

We started tonight’s mount runs with a trip to Zul’Gurub. No tigers or raptors dropped. In fact, the only thing that dropped was me when I stopped by the Gurubashi arena while Anubelle was getting some coffee to wake up. I managed to kill some alliance death knight trying to make off with the chest only to be immediately ambushed myself by a horde rogue, a friend of the guild, who had been lurking in the shadows. Grr, fucking Gunir.

So there I am a short while later, arriving at Auchindoun, slightly peeved but ready to fight my way deep inside Sethekk Halls for another chance at that pretty raven mount. But what’s this? Anubelle has become bored while waiting for me to move both my hunter and my druid alt here (more on that later) and has tabbed out to watch YouTube videos of nerdraging WoW players.

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Hey all, this is an RP story from back when Jinjiro was a human (my char on Scarshield Legion). I posted it in the forums but Anub thought it might be good to chuck it on the blog and graciously gave me an account to do so!

Enjoy!

Wind whipped at the solitary rider, high above the sweltering canyons and mines of the Searing Gorge, as he tightly gripped the reins of the armoured war gryphon that bore him swiftly away from the scene of the crime. Smoke rose up from the great forges and lava-filled trenches of the huge ravine below him, creating grey tentacles that clutched at the night sky, streaks of darker black against the night sky.

…and smoke curled languidly up from the small bonfire, as the small child sat, poking the lazily glowing ashes with a thin branch, gazing up at the throng of men that moved about him, oblivious. Men who roasted pigs over much larger, roaring flames, and laughed gruffly, pouring greasy-looking liquid down their throats…

As the great winged beast soared higher on a warmer blanket of air, making the aerial ride slightly more comfortable, Jinjiro glanced down at his right hand, blood still staining his skin where it had gushed outwards from the surely fatal wound he had inflicted on the General.

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Jomotei revved the engine and felt a slight chill run up her spine. She couldn’t quite decide if the exhileration she felt was due to the powerful rumble of the engine beneath her or the fact that she was putting her trust in a machine cobbled together by a crazy, undead engineer. Well, if it did explode, she’d go out with a bang at least. Literally.

After finally managing to drag my farmbot druid with herbalism, mining and epic flight form to level 77 for Cold-Weather Flying a little while back, I counted my gold yesterday and found I’d scrounged up enough gold to buy the Mechano-Hog I’d had my eye on. I was fortunate enough to know an engineer I’d trust with 12.500 gold + a bunch of expensive mats in Jinjiro and he crafted the bike in a matter of minutes. That’s either evidence of great skill and efficiency or he’s as crazy as a bat and doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing and I’ll probably die in a blaze of glory soon.

At any rate, the two of us had some awesome fun just tearing around Dalaran on my new bike. I’ve already had a Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth since I dinged level 74, and while the hog can’t advertise the usefulness of vendors, I have to say that it’s a more fun mount when it comes to pure riding.

I decided to make a blog post about the fun we had and frapsed us driving around like maniacs and jumping off Dalaran. While I was putting the video together I had the idea to turn it into an advertisement for Jinjiro’s services as a little thank you for his help. If it could send some customers his way and help him make enough gold to one day craft a hog for his own use, that’d be really awesome.

Hope you enjoy the clip, I had great fun making it. I recommend downloading it (27.5MB) as the text bubbles at the end are hard to make out when watching the stream.

Download movie in better quality (27.5MB) *recommended*

It was another afternoon in Dalaran. Everywhere you looked, bank alts were bustling to and from mailboxes, oblivious to the world around them. If you listened closely as they passed by you could hear them muttering to themselves as they tried to recall recipe requirements or add up all the gold coins jingling in their bags and pouches. Unfortunately, we were on our level 80 mains and bored out of our skulls.

“Hey,” someone suggested, “let’s go kill Sartharion.” As good a plan as any when you’ve got little better to do and your guild has stopped scheduling 10-man outings in favour of 25-man raids. There was just one small problem. There weren’t 10 of us.

A quick head count revealed we had 8 people and so we figured we might as well go with that for the Less is More achievement. But now another small problem reared its head; the group was a merry band of misfits. Our maintank had joined with his undergeared warlock alt. Instead, our group’s tank would be a death knight who usually fills a dps role. One of our dpsers was a pvp rogue, a friend of the guild. Most ominously of all, we had only one healer.

We blew caution to the wind, rolled up our sleeves and set off. I recorded the adventure that followed and decided to upload a video of the Sartharion encounter because I thought it was pretty impressive that our shaman, Argha, was able to solo-heal the instance.

Download in better quality (62MB)

I’d like to note that Sartharion himself was surprisingly easy, even with our silly setup. The trash was in fact more challenging as there was much more damage for the healer to handle. Given that it can be solo-healed, you can probably do Sartharion himself with a lot fewer than 8 if you had a well-balanced group of top geared and properly spec’d characters. Maybe something to try in the future. 5-man Sartharion, anyone?

Well, sort of.*

I recently had some time between raid days and decided to spec BM and take Sinh, my favorite pet, out for a walk. Poor thing’s been locked up in the stables for ages, so I thought I’d let him have some fun and headed down to Dustwallow Marsh to venture into the lair of Onyxia, broodmother of the Black Dragonflight.

Soloing Onyxia is kind of old hat at this point, but I figured doing it with a ferocity pet like the spirit beast, which lacks all the nice tanking talents of a tenacity pet, might make it slightly more challenging. I did spec myself and my pet to give him as much survivability as possible, though, but as it turned out, it was no challenge at all. All hail the mighty Sinh!

It seems Onyxia hits like a wet noodle these days and with 75% of its breath damage mitigated by the Avoidance talent, it turned out that I didn’t even have to use Mend Pet to heal him. He kept himself at full health through Bloodthirsty combined with Spirit Bond and the tier 5 set bonus.

I should mention that I didn’t bother re-glyphing from my MM raiding spec in case anyone is wondering why I don’t use serpent sting much in the video. That said, hope you enjoy it!

Download video (110MB) *recommended*

*The title is obviously a bit of a conceit, but refers to the fact that I was able to solo Onyxia without actively healing my pet. Obviously the tier 5 set bonus passively heals it for a good deal.

Yesterday was a bad day. A terrible day. Generally just a repugnant day of calamity and ill repute. I am of course referring to The Great Hunter Nerf of 2008.

Anyway, feeling like someone had just peed in my bowl of cereal, I decided to pick up my mood by flying out of Dalaran to tame some silly weird creatures and document it for the benefit of future generations.

Now you may know what I’m about to tell you already, but I’m going to tell you anyway, because if I didn’t, there wouldn’t be a blog post here. Alright? Good. So, the thing is, there’s a daily quest for the Oracles in Sholazar Basin named “A Cleansing Song” which makes you go out and summon and defeat the spirits of a hydra, Atha, an ooze, Koosu, and a crocolisk, Ha-Khalan. Pretty mundane stuff, but here’s the blog-worthy part; these three spirits are all tameable.

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Okay, so there we were in Molten Core, right, because Anubelle didn’t want to waste a chance to find those windseeker bindings or whatever and after killing Baron Geddon she was all, like, “anyone up for killing Attumen in Karazhan because it would be kinda cool to ride his horse”, you know, and I was all, like, sure and Argha came along too. Well, we killed Attumen quite quickly but unfortunately we also killed the horse, but oh well, omelets and all that. Anyway, then I was, like, “let’s slap Moroes around too, maybe we can find that Mongoose formula up there” and before we knew it we were deep in Karazhan, trying to clear the whole place of evil. Anyway, we were, like, totally engrossed in this chess match against Medivh’s shadow when suddenly…

Okay, I’m not sure why I’m doing a valley girl impression, Jomo’s not that kind of girl. Really, she’s not! At any rate, the recount of events is pretty accurate. Anubelle, Argha and I ended up 3-manning Karazhan late tonight. We killed Attumen, Moroes, Romulo & Julianne, Curator in one evocation, Illhoof, Shade of Aran and then reached the Chess event. Illhoof was the only time we flirted with a wipe; it was pretty close when Argha got sacrificed and bound in demonic chains. We survived, though.

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