Lunar Festival

The Lunar Festival celebrates the Azerothians' victory over the Burning Legion in the War of the Ancients roughly ten thousand years ago. To make a long story short, the Night Elves, under the rule of their beloved queen Azshara, practiced arcane magic for a few thousand years and summoned a demon army, a mess which Malfurion, Illidan and Rhonin had to clean up.

Anyway, as in most wars, there was naturally a lot of slaying, and it is through slaying that we must uphold the tradition of the Lunar Festival - and don't let the Cenarion Circle have you believe otherwise - hugging trees and visiting Elders is the worst way of honoring our ancestors' sacrifice. 

Click on the Dark Legacy comic to the right to see just how painful it is for our Elders to deal with us, the idiotic players, every year.

Instead, head to Moonglade and slay rats in the dozens!

Getting there: use a portal (from Orgrimmar or Stormwind depending on your faction) to Mount Hyjal and fly northwards past Winterspring for a couple of minutes.

     Where to slay?

The red area represents an area full of NPCs such as rocket vendors and glaive-wielding guards of death. Don't make the same mistake Artturi did several times by attempting to gank there.

The orange area is of course Nighthaven itself - visited by many players but also heavily guarded. In some areas of the village there are only harmless level 65 guards, but the glaive-wielding motherfuckers are lurking as well, especially around the seasonal vendors - gank at your own risk.

The green area is the most interesting one. This is where players summon Omen, and this is where I performed the vast majority of my Moonglade kills so far.

"Hurt me? Hah! I know no pain, rat! Wait, what are you doing?.. OH MY GOD HE'S RAPING MEEE"

Above screenshot was taken in Nighthaven. I had attacked some warlock who flew away (sensible decision, albeit less fun for me), and decided to test the guards. I ran around for a bit, aggroing a level 65 Moonglade Warden or two. Then I approached the vendors and, well, it turned out rather ugly. Notice how the cuddly and harmless Warden's name is written in pink while the glaive-wielding maniacs are like, LUNAR FESTIVAL MOTHERFUCKING SENTINELS, BITCH!

With the arrival of flying mounts in Azeroth, we must find ways of adapting. Artturi and I made a habit of sapping players who landed with their flying mounts, after which I would do a stunlock (cheap shot and kidney shot) while Artturi shadow danced. 

The only ones who escaped this were the ones who were lucky enough for either of my stuns to miss.

You cannot always have friends backing you up, of course. Using the same tactic alone is difficult, seeing as you use most of your energy on stuns. Sometimes you get them because you get a few lucky crits, other times because they dismount out of sheer stupidity or... well, stupidity. 

To the right is a druid who had pretty low health, so he died midair. Again, out of stupidity some druids don't HoT midair, just like some choose names such as Stórmrage out of stupidity.

While things such as forgetfulness and nervousness can be attributed to such a mishap, I think it is more likely that it is once again stupidity that hinders you from using a spell such as Typhoon on a small roof. 

Anyway, I suppose it isn't very considerate of me to e-bully someone just because they choose the Warcraft equivalent of 'Légòlas' as their name. We'll just pretend that it's a lame attempt at irony and move on...

If you don't have access to sap and/or stuns, there are other ways of dealing with enemy players who have landed on the ground but are still on top of their flying mount. In fact, there are better ways: hex, polymorph and maybe even mind control.

How To Honor Your Elders Properly 101: hiding under Omen's corpse and ganking.

User interface competition!
Have you got a nice ui you would like to share? Send it to me (by e-mail, skype or just link) and the readers will decide which they fancy the most in an upcoming poll.

Ravenholdt's Honor Kill Ladder

It's back. I am sure you have been biting your nails out of sheer eagerness, yearning and hungering for the list to once again learn who holds the title as the most enthusiastic HK farmer of Ravenholdt.

Rnnak  - 422434

Ufoz - 287327

Zylopfa - 276707

Wampyra - 257289

Parashade - 246196

Thibbledorf - 215232

Tagrid - 204355

Orçun - 188223

Canarion - 183162

Kaitel - 180890

It comes as no surprise that Rnnak, who is now apparently climbing towards 85 (three levels to go), remains the top slayer. We have also gotten our realm's fourth Bloodthirsty player - congratulations, Wampyra.

By the way, the blog has now been viewed 4000 times. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Zylkind... or something.

My user interface

Welcome to the complete guide to Zyl's addons. First a short bit of history...

September 9, 2009. I had recently bought a new 13" laptop since I was moving to another country and I didn't want to bring my desktop computer with me, so from then on I've almost played full-time on a very small screen; this makes things somewhat difficult (such as making quality movies), but it's alright.

So this is what my ui looked like back then. While quite ugly, it is, in hindsight, not very different from how it looks today... shit. Under the minimap is the Quest Helper addon which I no longer use (thank fuck), and I can't really understand why I kept it for so long considering I do quite few quests. 

May 16, 2010. I was obviously in a UI crisis at this stage, so I asked fellow rogue Joev if he could procure a nice compilation of addons for me seeing as he has a good eye for the aesthetic.

This is what it looked like at first (after removing and adding a few addons). Much cleaner thanks to removing the slightly superfluous right sidebar. You can see Grid in the upper left corner which I later removed since, well, I'm a rogue, I'm too cool for it. There were a few issues with out of date addons here however, so I could unfortunately not keep this look for long.

Another one bites the dust

Here you can see the ScrollingCombatText visible (the one managing the scrolling combat text if you hadn't figured it out) which at this point I had used for a year or so. It's a very nice addon, but I later removed it because at least on my 13" screen it felt too spammy - using fan of knives on ten rats was, surprisingly, an ugly sight. I turned the minimap into a square using simpleMinimap, which was also removed due to some sort of compatibility issue. The combat log is visible here because I was hunting for a Ganking Game victim.

Today my user interface looks as seen above. I made some additional changes today since I didn't want to post what in my view was a slightly defective ui. Itafeer and Naïma were kind enough to help me test the ui one last time before showing it to the scrutinizing public. As seen in the screenshot:

MoveAnything: I use this to move my character and target portraits into the middle of the screen which makes it easier to keep track of what your enemy's up to. This is my most important addon. Since Cataclysm I've experienced some minor bugs with it, but I haven't found any substitute. 

Vanas KoS: The rectangle above the minimap (which is transparent during combat) shows any nearby enemies that the combat log has picked up. I use this to find rats when I'm out ganking - when you're out of combat you can click the names in the vanaskos window to target them.

Bartender 4: Allows me to add, disable and move bars. These include but are not limited to action bars, micro menu and the bag menu.

OmniCC: Indicates the cooldown of abilities on my action bars. In the screenshot you can see that Kick (2s) and Sprint (55s) are on cooldown.

oGlow: Shows the duration of active abilities on my action bars. In the screenshot you can see that Slice and Dice (14s), Rupture (17s) and Sprint (2s) are active.

MikScrollingBattletext: Similar to ScrollingCombatText, but it's less spammy  in the way it displays AoE as e.g. '10533 [4 hits]' instead of displaying it four times. It also does the same for an ability that hits with short intervals such as Instant Poison's '3218 [2 hits]' as seen in the screenshot. Thanks to Droc for suggesting it some months ago. P.S: SCT might also have such a feature of course, in which case I've missed it and I look like an idiot.

Mappy: I downloaded this addon today because I was tired of a very circular map.

ArkInventory

And finally ArkInventory: Allows me to sort my bags by adding compartments. The ones I use are gems & jewel crafting supplies, ore/metal & engineering supplies, food, equipment, miscellaneous and (not displayed due to there being none in my bags) trash. This addon also allows me to check the items in my bank without visiting it as well as check items in my other characters' bags.

There is one thing I do not like about my ui at the moment. I do not like the character portraits. Got a nice addon to suggest to make them more... square? Then let me know here or ingame.

Reavan's Sunday event

There is a wpvp event planned for Sunday the 16th at 19:00 server time. It is to take place in the Crumbling Depths, more commonly known as the Therazane daily cave in Deepholm. 

I have a feeling there will be a large amount of rats present, so it is adamant that as many Horde as possible be present to avoid an event similar to Hearthglen, the final part of the pre-Cataclysm wpvp events.

Taken from the original post: 

Idea: Horde defend area past the big worm initially.
Alliance come in try to destroy horde, afterwords regardless of who won initial battle players must secure blue green and red areas for their faction. 
Faction that can secure most areas and keep them, wins. 

And along with it was a map... of which the quality strongly correlates with its author's wit.

sighreavan.png

Anyway, out of the kindness of my heart I made a map which doesn't look like it was drawn by a three year-old with ADD:

Alliance and Horde gather at the gunship and the cave respectively at 18:40, and the rats attack at 19:00.
The official battle ends at 19:30 but is likely to continue for a while. Happy slaying on Sunday.

A volontary ceasefire

I've been away for a while as I have been reminded of several times already. The reason for this has to do with the fact that the wpvp at 85 didn't quite reach my in hindsight perhaps slightly naive expectations, as well as the sad fact that a lot of my friends have either quit, gone inactive or defected to the rats (and however enjoyable it is to deliver punishment in person, conversation is also important - and the occasional bur or uden lo are hardly ideal examples of my preferred tête-à-têtes).

Now, I am unsure for how long my WoW hiatus will last - a week, month or year? - but I do know that I will stay true to promises made, and they are thus far such: I will write a few posts with topics including my user interface, the honor kill ladder (which I missed in December - no I am not sorry), stealth effectiveness and whatever else I may have forgotten.

So for the time being, stay tuned and slay in my absence.

P.S: this was announced a few days ago, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for the arena rogues in light of what I consider an excessive nerf:

Smoke bomb was as we all know, too powerful in arenas, but it could be balanced in a more delicate fashion - by having certain abilities and spells counter it (there are obvious examples such as thunderfuck, typhoon, holy light etc) - or just not reduce its duration so drastically. As for combat readiness, it seems more like a buff than a nerf depending on the wit of your opponent.