Life at 85

Most of us, including myself, have now reached level 85. The leveling experience was very enjoyable, and it would turn out that Uldum, apart from being a great zone in general, was even more of a ganker's paradise than Mount Hyjal was. As expected I took extremely few screenshots, in fact I've just taken one from Uldum (seen to the right), and it's hardly an exciting one - one of these days I will learn...

Bad news for those who were looking forward to enjoy Ramkahen's endless supply of enemy players:

It is still possible to gank in Ramkahen if you know where you're safe from guards (i.e. same as before except larger parts of Ramkahen are guarded).

Doing it right

Not doing it right

My ui isn't as it used to be because the MoveAnything addon is being a dick. I am working on it.

The little circle north of Ramkahen is a minor quest hub called 'Seal of the Sun King'.

Seal of the Sun King

Obelisk of the Stars - Chamber below

I have been meaning to post links to some sites I think are somewhat interesting:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/941589/ - official realm forums

http://ravenholdt.eu/ - unofficial realm forums

http://www.youtube.com/user/RatslayerProductions - my youtube channel

http://zyloshand.globalcontrol.biz/home - for the wpvp pie chart

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/ - PTR notes and interesting 'Blue' quotes

Now I will do battlegrounds for honor, heroics for gear and Tol Barad for pleasure. Don't hesitate to contact me if there's anything you'd like to know (ingame, here or on my youtube channel). Happy slaying.

Cataclysmic slaying

Hail rats and ratslayers!

It's been a great launch so far. Like-minded slayers joined the /catagank channel in order to provide communication throughout the levels which was immensely helpful when stalling rats on their way to level 85. Pandamonium, err I mean, Katakaclysm joined Dark Saints in time for the expansion, no doubt in order to gain the much needed protection from its members when climbing the ladder towards the realm's first 85. 

The irony in this is of course that he, among indeed most of Ravenholdt, loathes Parashade - if one is to believe the content of his awesome videos, that is, wherein he every now and then states that Parashade is a noob - a fact refuted by no one.

Either way, without further ado I present to you a movie containing some Deepholm slaying.
Enjoy the shitty quality and content.

And here below is Pandamonium seemingly locked in deep thought. Pondering his choice of protectors, perhaps? On a more serious note, it is evident that it will be hard to level when you have a certain amount of people after your skin, but the real question is perhaps whether the diversion of the name and guild change made the situation worse.

 

 Or indeed the real irony here is perhaps that the ratslayers put such effort into stalling the rats from getting realm first 85, only to see it go to Válkirie, who faction transferred mere days before the Cataclysm? It also makes you wonder, was the real reason for the whole Accidentally guild changing faction just that, to avoid the ratslayers? Maybe we will never know - but we will have to be content for now knowing that a current rat didn't achieve the feat. 

On that note, I will continue leveling and slaying as I go along.

4.0.3a

Tomorrow Azeroth as we know it will be replaced by a scorched, flooded and termite infested continent (or today already if you play on a US server). While this is certainly very interesting, I won't go into any details regarding world changes or overall class balances, but I will on the other hand look at the rogue changes.

So what's new here? We already looked at the recuperate nerf, which judging by level 85 balance, we can all agree was necessary. Assassination is getting a well-deserved Venomous Wounds buff and also a buff to the deadly poison dot. It will be interesting to see how useful it will be and maybe it will even surpass Subtlety - not like it's far from anyway.

But then there's something rather disturbing up there. Player guardians and temporary pets now stop attacking when a rogue uses Vanish, but city guards will not. Right. You might remember the 4.0.1 post, wherein it was discovered that city guards for the first time in one year no longer were immune to vanish, a great victory for rogues all over Azeroth - but now they have confirmed that it is a bug and it will be removed tomorrow. Words cannot express how disappointed I am.

My MS Paint skills, however, can. FFFUUUUUU

There's been a battle.net thread made on the topic of the travesty should you feel the need to vent your anger or just gloat.

Edit on November 25th:
The battle.net thread was removed, most likely because the original poster called the change 'gay', so I've made a new thread (note that I am not calling the change gay, subtlety is key) on the subject.
Show your support.

Of the Horde

I reached the magical number.

 The quality is indeed quite terrible, but you'll just have to live with that.
 Thanks once again to Sechen, Sllythe, Naïma and Stealthr.

 150 000 to go!

The Elemental Invasion thus far

This is so fucking exciting!

Yesterday night part 4 of the elemental invasion began. People were reporting that Orgrimmar was under attack by elementals, and judging by the commotion caused it was certainly more serious than the previous petty "attacks".

While it is evident that Blizzard's intention was for the invasion to start off small and then have it escalate, the first three parts were quite lackluster.

Quests to do with lore are by all means great, but this is the Cataclysm we're talking about - we don't want to go around babysitting small fire elementals in Orgrimmar, we want to kick some elemental ass.

Part 3 of the invasion started three days ago, on the 13th. This is where things started getting interesting - apart from disrupting even more twilight cultists, we were sent off to Nagrand.

Horde dogs and Alliance rats gathered just under the elemental plateau, and since this is Ravenholdt we're talking about, people naturally started slaying.

There was just one problem - the Throne of the Elements is the home of four elemental elites. Gordawg is seen in the image to the right, and to quote wowwiki, "he will one shot you" if you engage in PvP here.

Casters could attack quite freely from the Stonehenge-esque stone arches, but eventually people started heading to Halaa instead.

Enter Novemeber 15th. Seven of us were in an Arathi Basin premade when people in guild chat reported that elementals had started attacking Orgrimmar at 21:15. Mmo-champion confirmed that part 4 of the elemental invasion, the last before Deathwing attacks, had just started. When we had beaten the rat randoms in Arathi we portaled into Orgrimmar.

More and more people joined in and eventually formed the biggest crowd I have ever seen in WoW. 

While some 315k health elementals attacking a capital city isn't a fantastical phenomenon, the amount of people joining in was what made the event impressive.

 

The black Orgrimmar sky is lit up by the elemental flames

So we headed to some Alliance capitals to see how crowded it was there and how hard it would be to stealth around. Stormwind city was crawling with rats, and after dying a couple of times Artturi and I decided to check out Ironforge.

It started out quite satisfactory. We got a few kills, but then someone who we weren't expecting turned up.

That's right, the midget king came after us. I didn't get a better screenshot however - the first thing I do when I aggro a 5 million hp faction boss is not precisely to take a screenie - notice the sprint + vanish.

Needless to say, we deemed Ironforge especially dangerous (it's bad enough with its few escape routes and choke points) and headed home.

As a pre-expansion event, the Elemental Invasion will naturally be compared with the pre-WotLK Scourge Invasion (which originates from the patch 1.11 Naxxramas Scourge Invasion), which is a hard event to beat, really. It doesn't share the same PvP quality of the Scourge Invasion (indeed, it barely has any PvP quality), which even allowed you to attack your own faction. The fourth part of the Elemental Invasion was quite spectacular though, I must say - and we haven't even seen Deathwing yet.

Rogue changes etc

This is just a small post with minor updates which I haven't been able to fit elsewhere.

PTR 4.0.3: Recuperate now restores 2% of health every 3 seconds, down from 3%.
It was only a matter of time before it happened, since recuperate has been very powerful at level 85.

Here's the rogue s9 set sans shoulder pads which I probably should have showed you when it was released a week and a half ago:

Doesn't look horrible, right? Here's hoping that the shoulder pads won't look completely hopeless.

Lately even more people are having issues turning on /PvP, and some have argued that Kyalo's Auto PvP Enabler isn't doing the job since 4.0.1, so here's a link to Eleris' PvPOn. Personally I think it's simpler to, you know, type /PvP, but maybe that's just me.

People have complained that they need a gmail account to post comments, so I've added a shoutbox to the bottom of the blog by the footer.

Ravenholdt's Honor Kill Ladder

November is here, and along with it a new list. The top Honor Killers of Ravenholdt are:

Rnnak  - 400624

Ufoz - 274829

Zylopfa - 260353

Wampyra - 236100

Parashade - 227241

Thibbledorf - 199040

Tagrid - 192112

Canarion - 183162

Orçun - 182441

Kaitel - 171319

...And now the thrilling conclusion of the Hearthglen event! The Horde gathered by the Bulwark in Tirisfal Glades, eager to drive away the Alliance rats who had set up camp so close to the Undercity. 

Ylo and Astartel sent word that the rats had a larger force than we had anticipated - it was estimated that they had a full platoon, in other words 60 rats.

It soon became evident that our spies' sightings didn't do the size of the rats' raid any justice. We had a wall of 75 rats to break through, and our 60 man army wasn't strong enough.

I am somewhat satisfied that the Alliance was able to muster so many rats seeing as they have generally been outnumbered lately. Had it been the Horde who had come with such numbers, it might have deterred the rats from joining future events altogether.

Congratulations on the victory, rats. We are even - for now.

Trambu's Sunday events

Ravenholdt has what some would refer to as a tradition of sorts when it comes to PvP events. Many among you remember Dacarn's zealous RP posts announcing the next battlefield for the forces of the Horde dogs and Alliance rats to clash on. More still remember the fights that took place and the stalemates that occurred whenever one side would defend a keep somewhere.

It was thanks to those battles, the Sunday PvP events, that we saw areas we'd only pass through at level 37 on our way to that dungeon otherwise. We approach an expansion that will change the face of Azeroth forever, and we have ahead of us less than a month to enjoy the Old World before Deathwing surfaces.

In light of this, Trambu of Tides of Misery has been organizing Sunday events throughout Azeroth.

These are the events that have transpired so far:

Thousand Needles 17/10

The event was described by many as a disaster, with low attendance from the Alliance side, or as most put it, the Dark Saints.


It sparked quite a debate and is arguably the first evidence of the decrease in the Alliance's activity as the Wrath of the Lich King expansion draws to its end.



Hillsbrad Foothills 24/10

This time the rules were different. The Alliance and the Horde assigned a King who they would place in Azurlode Mine and Durnholde Keep respectively. Whichever faction's King survived the longest would win.

Itafeer was appointed Horde King, and Rasu represented the Alliance. It was a close call, but the Horde managed to down the opponent's King first.


Fanatix filmed the battle:



Arathi Higlands 31/10

The objective of the Arathi Highlands battle was to plant five faction banners in the enemy's base - the Horde was stationed by the Boulderfist Outpost while the Alliance resided in Stromgarde Keep's crypt.

As seen in the screenshot to the left (courtesy of Haldan), the Alliance was victorious; third's a charm, as they say.




Hearthglen, Western Plaguelands 7/11

The fourth event in the series, scheduled for tomorrow at 21:00 server time. This time there aren't any special objectives as in the two previous events, but rather one side, starting with the Alliance, will defend the hill leading up to Hearthglen.

Once they are defeated, the Horde will get to defend it against the Alliance. Bring warm clothing, rats - it will be a long night.

Western Plaguelands - RATS GO HOME

Zerg drama

Lately there have been a lot of discussions (read: flame wars) about zergs. I wasn't going to beat a dead horse, but I decided to anyway. Consider this post the official guide to the most recent Ravenholdt drama.

First of all, you'll want read the most relevant thread: Zylopfa's thread on ganking.

Zylos Hand is a WPvP guild, we dont wait for people to get full health or
full mana before we attack them, neither do we wait for them to be of equal
numbers before we attack them. In the art of ratslaying all that counts is getting
the enemy down, them being outnumbered or not.
- Zylopfa

Basically he is saying that zerging happens, and he is fine with that. This does not reflect the opinion of all of Zylos Hand's members, however; Reavan has publicly condemned zerging - although he did this after leaving the guild. He says that the reason for his departure is that Zylos Hand has too many immature members, and it just isn't the same as in The Burning Crusade.

I am not particularly fond of zergs either, whether I am on the receiving end or otherwise - I much prefer smaller fights. I have and will continue to join big raids since I enjoy that as well, but I usually leave groups when they reach too great advantages, unless it's in friendly territory. This is not because I seek some sort of moral high ground, but rather I find it insipid.

How many rats does it take to kill some Horde dogs?

The origin of zerg: Starcraft. I have never touched the game.

Now, to address the issue at hand. Why has there been an increase in zergs? One possible explanation is that WPvP is scarcely found outside of the Elwynn Forest area, and as such people tend to cluster thereabouts and form large raids, or zergs if you will - but then surely this would have happened earlier on. I believe that as we approach a new expansion, some guilds suffer more than others in terms of inactivity. Some people have quoted warcraftrealms.com which shows that there is an activity ratio between the Horde and the Alliance of 1 to 1.7 on Ravenholdt, which in turn would explain why the rats have been suffocated.

Say what you will about zergs, it will always be a common phenomenon whether you like it or not.

How not to be seen: a rogue's greatest ability.

And now for something completely different...











Harrianlar found a bug which enabled him to tame an infinite amount of pets. In the spirit of science, he headed into Stormwind to investigate further. He reportedly managed to heal himself for amounts in the millions, as well as firing off 150k Arcane Shots on targets with high resilience. Consequently it would appear he has received a temporary ban - what a great shame indeed.

Edit 6/11: I would like to specify that Harrianlar received a forum ban for making a post about the pet bug - his WoW account was unaffected. Apologies to any confusion this may have caused.

Before you ask, I remained mounted to offer a certain squishy mage some additional protection.

I regret that I didn't manage to take any better screenshots. Apparently someone filmed the spectacle, and if you know where to find a clip of it, then please let me know.

Ravenholdt's Honor Kill Ladder

It's time to update the list again. I think this time around it's very accurate (thanks for your tips and contributions, everyone). The current top Honor Killers of Ravenholdt are:

Rnnak  - 397160

Ufoz - 260941

Zylopfa - 260353

Wampyra - 231767

Parashade - 224165

Thibbledorf - 198009

Canarion - 182866

Tagrid - 178178

Kaitel - 169779

Arthurios - 155903

Do you know someone who belongs on the ladder? Post a comment or let me know ingame.

I have interviewed Rnnak, a level 70 feral/resto druid who has the most lifetime HKs on Ravenholdt. Grammar and overall sentence structure have been heavily edited for the sake of reading comprehension.

Rnnak, you have the most honorable kills on Ravenholdt - how did you go about accumulating such an impressive amount?

"This is the only character I play on since almost four years, and I just love doing battlegrounds."

You have a 2v2 team called 'wotlksux' and your character is level 70. Why did you choose not to purchase the Northrend expansion and stay at 70?

"The main reason I didn't upgrade to WotLK was to participate in more challenging battlegrounds which include more pvp and less honor grinding. There is also a feeling of overpower when you can solo a small group of enemies."

Rnnak continues, "But I would rather flame people who didn't know how to play their class. Two decent levelers could make a mess out of me if they knew how to counter feral."

Tell us a little about the guild you're in, Flame of Neltharion. It is made up of mostly level 80 characters who are raiding Icecrown Citadel - how do you fit into the picture?

"The guild was designed as level 70 only. At a time we had approximately eighty active accounts, and we would easily have between twenty and thirty players online for pure level 70 raids. Eventually people started to bring their [level 80] mains into the guild. The guild master got fond of Icecrown Citadel and that's how FoL started raiding that instance. Meanwhile the level 70s moved to a guild called 'Cupcake Crusaders' - but it fell apart and now they, too, are level 80."

Note: at the time of publishing this interview, Rnnak has moved to a little guild called 'Pessimistic Dominance' - good luck in there!

Cataclysm is around the corner. Do you plan on making an arena team called 'catasux' or will you purchase the new expansion?

"I will stay at level 70 for a while to see how things progress, and then I will level to 80". Rnnak adds, "By the way, 'wotlksux' was my teammate's idea, I dislike names of that kind."

Once you've hit 80, will you stay there or go further to the new level cap, 85?

"I will move on when I get fed up with Wrath of the Lich King content."

Could you give aspiring HK farmers some tips for reaching the top?

"It took almost three years at 60 and one year at 70 to get to where I am now. Just do battlegrounds and play WoW for fun, don't mess with achievements."

Thanks for your time, Rnnak!

Rnnak's 2v2 team reached rank 31 and a peak rating of 2057. The reason for sharing this is that the armory currently displays the rating as 0 as well as zero games played for all its members.

What tomorrow brings

Putting out fires in Brill, collecting flimsy masks and countless hours spent ganking outside of Scarlet Monastery. It’s everyone’s favorite event: Hallow’s End! - But it might not be as great this time around. Ever since players could teleport to instances using the Dungeon Finder, world pvp has been dealt a critical blow. Many of you are already well aware of this, most notably from a Brewfest without any festive mind-controlling-people-into-the-lava bonanza.

Obtaining this mount will be painfully painless this year.

Out of the seasonal events Brewfest and especially Hallow’s End have stood out as great opportunities to participate in wpvp since the associated event bosses have offered loot desirable enough for players to visit them everyday.

It was as late as during Brewfest this year that I realized that all those moments spent in Blackrock Mountain and Tirisfal Glades are gone forever. When it became clear that meeting stone ganking was over with, I hadn’t even thought about the seasonal event pvp that we would be without.

Instance teleporting doesn’t just have a negative effect on pvp. The world becomes dull when it’s empty, and the effort put into the different zones seems almost for nothing when everyone is idling in Dalaran. I would be surprised if there isn’t at least a handful of developers at Blizzard who feel at unease with everyone teleporting to Scarlet Monastery instead of traveling there by more traditional means (those brooms are not for cleaning).

Pretty messy ui, huh.

Who knows how these events will look in Cataclysm; the development team is going in the right direction with Tol Barad as they acknowledged the demand for wpvp – they might just acknowledge seasonal wpvp, too.

4.01 - WPvP and rogue changes

Patch Day was celebrated by raging at steamrolling wizards and cheering when you could ambush + backstab someone to death (hello 40% health ambush, we've missed you so much!) - but that was all hotfixed by buffing resilience by 50% today.

Result?

So what are the big rogue changes? Maybe you noticed my 75k healing done. That's right, Recuperate - the ability that will change rogues forever. It can be used in stealth, which means you can easily find a nearby target, premeditate (for Subtlety rogues) and hit recuperate. Repeat a couple of times and you'll be back to full health in no time. I wouldn't be surprised to see this nerfed by causing you to exit stealth in a patch or two.

What else is new? The attribute system has received an overhaul, so now you will mostly be using agility gems au lieu de attack power. That is not all, however: haste now affects energy regeneration. As a result I have reforged all my gear, turning 40% of my crit into haste.

510 haste after reforging - and still at over 45% crit.

Furthermore, I have had my MH enchanted with mongoose - thanks for the tip, Sllythe!

This is my current spec. I've tried loads of different specs since 4.01 (including combat!), and this is the one I am the most satisfied with; well worth the ~300g spent respecing!

I have no Nightstalker points to allow for points to be spent in Sanguinary Vein, as well as no points in Waylay since I am using crippling poison on my OH.

That covers the rogue part for now. What about WPvP?
Well, there aren't any major changes, but they are interesting enough. First of all, guard spam in cities has been increased massively. Astartel mentioned the change (which for the record isn't mentioned anywhere in the patch notes) so we went into Stormwind's Trade District to investigate. I was killed within seconds with evasion up.

Cluster rats!

I was pretty upset until I found out about another City change. The guards aren't immune to vanish anymore! A welcome change indeed. City guards started being immune in patch 3.02, so it's appropriate that their vanish immunity is removed with its WotLK equivalent, 4.01.

We were hanging out by the Stormwind gates, ganking rats here and there. Eventually they had enough and enabled blueshielding. Don't worry though, once the odds were in their favor they started fighting again.

A typical turncoat rat - nothing out of the ordinary here

Congratulations to Astartel for the delicious rat whine, coming from above druid called Crysi (screenshot courtesy of Whiplásh):

Keep on making the rats rage, Fucking Retard Astartel!

With the new PvP interface (default key binding H) the readily available statistics for daily kills and honor gained are gone. It is a bit of a shame, but no great casualty - we will just have to consult the statistics page (default key binding shift Y).

I'm past 80000 HKs, which puts my average HK/day since I started blogging at a little over 700.

Got any delicious whines you'd like published on the blog? Let me know ingame.