Got some new stuff since my last post. Today, I passed into Exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive! In return, I was able to
1) upgrade my neck to [Shattered Sun Pendant of Acumen] and...
2) Complete the quest A Magnanimous Benefactor to obtain the title Unbarc of the Shattered Sun. Sure, it was 1,000, but I'm not spending what I have (still have 2k left), and my only other title from the old PvP days is Senior Sergeant or something.

Last night I decided to cash in my 41 for an [Icon of the Silver Crescent]. I'm losing crit, but I'm trying to upgrade overall dps (according to MaxDPS.com). Now if I could just save up enough badges to replace my almost-2-year-old [Ring of the Eternal Flame]...

Well, had myself another birthday yesterday (the 24th), and dinged 26. The day before, I was able to see Gruul and Magtheridon for the first time, and ended up getting [Legwraps of the Aldor], which also gave me one of my favorite set bonuses.

So what'd I get for my birthday? Nothing yet... on Sunday I'm getting Mario Kart for the Wii, and GTA IV for the 360 on Tuesday. Also, in my email inbox this morning was this message:

FigurePrints Wrote:

Congratulations!

You have been selected to create your very own FigurePrint!

Your account has been enabled to allow you to place an order any time before midnight May 9, 2008 PST. To be clear, being selected only grants you the opportunity to purchase a FigurePrint and this email is not meant as a free or discounted product.

To complete your order, simply sign into the FigurePrints website and select "Place An Order" from the main menu on www.figureprints.com to start the process of creating your very own custom FigurePrint.

Please note that this purchase privilege has been granted to you for your personal use only. Any attempted resale of this privilege is a violation of the terms and conditions you agreed to when you registered your account, and can result in a termination of any attempted online resale transaction as well as a deregistration of your account and any rights or privileges associated with your account.

Again, congratulations! We look forward to bringing your character into reality.

Sincerely,

The FigurePrints Team

So it looks like Unbarc will soon be on my desk under a glass dome! I'll post pictures as soon as I get it.

Not a big update, but an update none the less. I got into Kara for the Chess event and for Prince, and got something from my Wishlist: [Ruby Drape of the Mysticant].

Not much more going on then that, I haven't played much this week. One thing that I've been playing with is changing how I update my profile. Currently, I use an addon that pulls out all the data you see (plus more), and just parse that. It works great, but only when I can remember to upload the file to the site in order to be parsed. What I've been doing is seeing what kind of data I can pull off of the WoW Armory's XML files. It's not quite as detailed as the addon I use, but all it would take to update my profile is a click of a link, which can be done from anywhere, whereas I currently have to be on my computer that has WoW installed... Guess it all comes down to how bored I get.

Logged on yesterday, and someone asked why there were so many dead bodies / skeletons around the badge vendor over on Isle of Quel'Danas... so I went to investigate. Turns out, Smith Hauthaa started selling the new loot, and people were just being stupid by standing on her, and flagging.

Anyways, I couldn't decide what I wanted at first, but I ran back to my bank, grabbed 75 [Badge of Justice], and turned them in for [Boots of Incantations].

Now if my server back up (Kael'thas, along with many others) my goal today is to get enchanting maxed... even though I know it'll be expensive. I've got 35 skillups to go.

Did another run through Kara last night, got another 23 , and it seemed to be Pally-loot night, because we didn't have one in the group... at least 4 healing plate items dropped. Anyways, the only thing I got was this: [Formula: Enchant Weapon - Sunfire]. Currently, I'm only 320 in Enchanting, so it looks like I have some work to do! Hopefully I'll have the required (and EXPENSIVE) mats by the time I hit 375;
12x [Void Crystal]
10x [Large Prismatic Shard]
8x [Greater Planar Essence]
6x [Primal Fire]
1x [Primal Might]

So in the past half of a month, a lot has happened. Firstly, I changed guilds from HRU to Bláck Sun. Once in Bláck Sun, I went on my first (and second) complete clear of Karazhan, which also gave me about 45 [Badge of Justice]. I also got to upgrade some gear both times; the first time, I upgraded my bracers... twice, and ended up with [Bands of Nefarious Deeds]. Later that night, I grabbed up the [Mantle of the Mind Flayer].

Fast forward a week, and it's my 2nd full time through Kara (minus the first boss). I get more badges, and then on Prince, the 2 items I want drop, one being [Nathrezim Mindblade]. Someone else wanted it, so we had to /rand; luckily, I somehow managed to will the die to land on 100. Hopefully this week, I can get a new cloak. After completing a few Karazhan-related quests, I got to Revered status, and upgraded my ring to [Violet Signet].

On the PvP side of things, after about 2 months, I had enough honor saved up to upgrade my neck to [Vindicator's Pendant of Conquest], and put in a [Vivid Chrysoprase] gem.

One random piece of loot I forgot to mention when I actually got it: [Boots of Blasphemy].

If you've actually read any of my previous posts, you know that I play pretty casually. Last night I was running through Coilfang Resivoir: The Slave Pens, and I got enough [Badge of Justice] to actually buy myself an upgrade, so I went off and got a [Flametongue Seal] (upgrade from [Hortus' Seal of Brilliance]). I wasn't too keen on losing the sta/int, but I gain a lot of crit, and fire damage (I lost overall damage, but 97% of my spells are fire anyway, which is why I still use [Ring of the Eternal Flame]).

My plan is to next upgrade my neckpiece through some PvP... even though I don't care for it much. Oh well.

Dang, as it almost been 3 months since my last update? Since I don't have a developer's version of the site on my work laptop, I guess I let this site slip past me a bit. Hopefully I'll get back into doing updates (news and site-wise). Well, let's get to it.

Loot

Here's my most recent loots:
[Reins of the Onyx Netherwing Drake]
[Collar of the Aldor]
[Spellstrike Pants]
[Gladiator's Touch of Defeat]

Finally, I got my Netherwing Drake mount. I admit, I didn't do my daily quests... well, daily, but I got it now, so I can stop fighting everybody to kill a stupid Nethermine Ravager.

I've only been to Karazhan twice. The first time, it was for the first 2 bosses (with no loots), and this second time, it was for the last 2 bosses. Luckily, I won the roll for the T4 token, and got my helm. It was a pretty nice upgrade from what I used to have.

I also buckled down and finally got the mats together for my [Spellstrike Pants]. The hardest part was finding a Tailor who knew the pattern, and either A) Had a [Primal Nether] they could use or B) Have enough [Badge of Justice] to buy one.

Lastly on the loot frontier, I actually did some PvP on my own. If you knew me, you'd be surprised. The most honor I've gotten is just over 10k (that's total, from the day I started playing 3 years ago, without spending any previously). So, I upgraded my wand for the Gladiator's.


I have some more junk to post about, and site updates to do (probably Gallery pictures of my new mount), but I'm at work, and should probably get back to that.

Patches


Karazhan


Site Changes

Over the past few days, I've hit some big milestones on Unbarc. First, I finally made my [Spellfire Robe] (which I dropped some gold on, since I was really tired of waiting for my 4 day timer...)! The set is complete, and at some point I'll probably start in on the Spellstrike set.

Second, after about a year and a half of throwing Runecloth in Thunder Bluff, they finally deemed me Exalted. I cast Slow Fall, mounted up on my horse and ran off the edge in excitement, floating almost half-way to Bloodhoof Village. There, I got myself a nice and shiny [Great White Kodo]. Now some of you might be asking "Why didn't you just get it the easy way from PvP?" and I'll reply with "Because I think PvP sucks and I really don't like it."

Besides, what fun is it to do stuff the easy way? I always somehow find myself doing things the hard way...

Ok, Azerothianites. My old domain was on the verge of expiration, and I decided to switch registrars. In doing so, I decided to register a new domain, www.unbarc.com. A little more fitting, don't you think? Once I get my old domain straightened out, I'll try and forward all that traffic to the new domain.

On the professions front, I made it up to 374, and have had the past 4 items I've made not get me over that last little skill. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow I'll have tailoring maxed, and the ability to make 20 slot bags, and finish my Spellfire set.

Speaking of which, since I last posted (yeah, I need to get back into posting more often), I made myself a [Spellfire Belt] and [Spellfire Gloves], and fitted each one with a [Potent Noble Topaz] and a [Glowing Nightseye]. Vera nice. All that's left is to make a robe, then try and start saving up the mats/money for the Spellstrike set.

Patch 2.1.0 came out recently, with a ton of changes. One of the best changes: gold spam reduction. Before the patch, I was getting between 10-15 gold-spam whispers per login, now I've gotten a total of 3 since patch day.

After almost 2.5 years of playing WoW, I finally had my first world-drop epic drop when I was farming in Netherstorm. After a few days of sitting on it, I put it up in the AH for 500 starting, 700 buyout, and it ended up selling for 671. Needless to say, that money was spent the next day on mats to try and max out the tailoring.

Tomorrow night, my wife and I are going to be taking a real look at a house. In the past, we've just been looking online, but now we're actually starting to go out and see what the houses look like in person. We found one we really like, so hopefully it'll turn out that way for real.

It's been 2 months, so I figured I should post some sort of update. I haven't really been playing Unbarc a whole lot lately. For a little while I was working on leveling my alt hunter, Barcana. The past week or so, though, I decided to drop my previous profession of Jewelcrafting (keeping Mining for some cash), and I took up Tailoring. Surprisingly, it didn't take too long to get up to 335 tailoring... Jewelcrafting took FOREVER. Right now I'm in a slump because of a lack of [Netherweave Cloth]. It's going to take me a while, but here's the reason(s) I switched:
[Spellfire Belt]
[Spellfire Gloves]
[Spellfire Robe]

As for the site, I've done some new things. There's a new Tutorials section. There isn't much there yet, but it's something I can add to over time. Right now I've written a couple of short tutorials about WoWMapView and how to convert WoWModelView models to Lightwave (you can see some examples here).

Pretty soon, the 2.1.0 will be going live. This is the biggest changelog yet... my version is 1322 lines of text long (my version being HTML-formatted), and the previous longest one was 1.11.0 with only 823 lines.

On the loots side, I haven't gotten much. I think the only thing of late would be these from a quest:
[Shattrath Wraps]

On the other side of the computer screen, my wife and I are starting the process of finding a house, which I'll probably start playing even less because of this. We're so tired of living in an apartment, and we're really looking forward to having someplace we can crank up the surround-sound without the people on the other side of the wall complaining, or doing the same thing.

Another boring day at work results in more site changes. On the Profile page, I finally found a nice clean way to grab all of my Reputation and Skills, and they can be seen from the tabs at the bottom of my character frame.

A little bit bigger change was done to the news posts. I've added the ability to tag each post I make, which will allow people to view somewhat related entries at once. The list of tags will be at the end of each entry, and are in no specific order.

Also, I've been trying to get my Jewelcrafting up to at least a skill of 300 (that's when you can start to cut gems). I did get my mining up to 375 last week before I left Runetotem, now I just need to mine a bunch of lower-level ore to prospect. I'm trying to spend as little money as possible through the AH to skill it up, and it's proving to be quite a feat.

Did a run of Tempest Keep: The Arcatraz and became Revered with The Sha'tar, so I was able to get my Heroic key, and a nice helm enchant that does +22 spell damage and +10 hit chance.

First, a goldsink! Dang this is such a fast mount.
[Swift Yellow Windrider]

Also, after a week of doing basically nothing, I'm going back 'home' to Kael'Thas, and back to Dark Portal Syndicate. Logged in to the server last night, and they had 40 people on. Even though I'm probably not going to get a raid spot (which, in itself, is fine), there should be people on to do 5-man stuff. This will be my 3^rd transfer, so hopefully it'll be my last.

It's been 2 weeks since The Burning Crusade was released, and it's been a pretty good time. I've gotten Unbarc up to level 67, and replaced some (not much, but some) gear with quest rewards and a drop or 2. I think my favorite upgrade thus far is from a quest, [Battle Mage's Baton]. It's better then [Staff of the Shadow Flame], which drops off of Nefarian, and it's a quest reward. After seeing all this stuff drop in the 5-man instances (blues/greens), I'm really anxious to see what comes from the 25-man raids. With all the quests and quick instances I've been doing, I shot my banked gold from 950g to 2100g as of last night. Looks like I won't have any problems getting a flying mount when I hit 70.

Now on to some bad news (for me, anyway). With the latest patch, the mage talent Improved Fireball and Improved Frostbolt have been given a damage reduction of 2% for each point you put into it, which comes out to a spell that reduces cast time by 0.5 seconds and reduces spell damage by 10%. To try and avoid this, I tried to respec and get around that talent, but needless to say I hated it. I went all the way down to Slow in Arcane, and put the rest in fire (minus Improved Fireball). It may not seem like it, but a 3.5 second cast fireball seems like an eternety after a year of casting a 3 second fireball. By the end of the night I switched back to my old build and just dealt with the damage reduction. It's not too bad, since I just got my new staff, along with the new enchant +40 spelldamage to weapon. I even replaced my gloves with some nice socketed ones ([Tempest's Touch]) and put some crit gems into it, so my crit is building up enough to where I don't care about the damage nerf. After I get these new gloves enchanted with the +20 all damage (instead of my old +20 fire damage), I should be up to around 580ish spell damage and 25% crit with fire.

After a few weeks of working, I just got myself an iPod. Not just any iPod, but a 5^th generation 80gb video iPod. Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon organizing my music and subscribing/downloading/listening to podcasts. There's a few good WoW podcasts, and I added them to my Links.

Finally, after about a month of nothing, I was recently able to update my gear a little bit:
[Enigma Shoulderpads]
[Gem of Nerubis]

On the Burning Crusade frontier, it seems that Blizzard has pushed the release date to January of 2007.

Eyonix Wrote:

IRVINE, Calif -- Blizzard Entertainment® today announced that the release date for World of Warcraft®: The Burning Crusade(tm), the highly anticipated expansion for World of Warcraft, will be in January 2007. By adding a few extra weeks to the development cycle beyond its original target date, Blizzard will be able to extend the closed beta test and further refine the new content that will ship with the game.

"We appreciate the enthusiasm surrounding World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, and we're excited about putting the finishing touches on all of the new content," said Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We feel confident that the extra time spent polishing the game will result in the high-quality experience that our players expect and deserve."

Blizzard began the closed-beta phase of testing on World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade earlier this month. The January 2007 release window will allow extra time for current beta testers to participate in the final stages of development and continue providing valuable feedback. Further information on specific worldwide release dates, pricing, and other details will be announced in the near future.

Kael'thas will be down for the next day or so, in order to upgrade the hardware for The Burning Crusade. This is a tad annoying, since it takes away one of my 3 nights of raiding this week, but that just shows how much closer to releasing the expansion they are.

Last week's loots: [Ring of the Eternal Flame]

Last night, Patch 1.12 was released. It's not really a patch that I'm interested in, so I won't go much more into it.

PvP. Oooooh boy!

On another note, I finally got into Friendly with the Brood of Nozdormu, and I was able to get my ring! (I skipped getting my neutral ring, since the rep flew past that pretty quickly)
[Signet Ring of the Bronze Dragonflight]

Yeah, it's been a little while since my last update. Mainly, there hasn't been much to update with. While I was on vacation, double [Netherwind Robes] finally dropped, and one the following week. The guild also killed Anub'Rekhan (Nax) and Princess Huhuran (AQ40) while I was gone. Tonight, they have a full night of learning the Twin Emperors fight.

Last night, I was actually able to go on a ZG run, followed by a world dragon kill. Here's the notable loots:
[Cloak of Consumption]
[Jade Inlaid Vestments]

Last night was a good night for us. We cleared BWL for the first time on our new server, I got over a 10K crit from my Ignite tick, and I got loots.

First off, it was really something to do Blackwing with no lag. We weren't used to it. We've always used the lag, accepted its presence, and rolled with it. Had a wipe on Razorgore, since the mobs weren't standing around like normal, rogues pulled aggro on Vael, and hunters weren't getting the Tranq shot off fast enough with Ebonroc. Even with some wiping, we still did a full clear in 4.5 hours. It was actually our best run through the rest of the instance, kill-wise. People were actually assisting for a change!

For the 3^rd time in a row, I actually lived through the Nef encounter. I'm beginning to think that my problem was the [Limited Invulnerability Potion]s, since I always died when I used them.

New Loots!
[Mind Quickening Gem]
[Head of Nefarian] (turned into)
[Master Dragonslayer's Orb]

Now I go on vacation for a week and a half. Unfortunately I won't 'make it to the BWL clear again tonight (our server transfer wiped our saved raids clean). Hopefully, when Nef dies tonight, the #21 or #22 breastplate off him is Netherwind, because Nef is a bastard.

Well it's been a little bit since I posted last... I've been enjoying the mage changes with the 1.11.0 patch. Earlier in the week, we actually didn't get the [Cloak of Firemaw] (which we tend to get almost every damn week), but instead [Firemaw's Clutch] dropped. Luckily, I got it, so I have a spiffy new belt.

Also, Blizzard decided to release a patch last night around the peak hour. The patch took people 20+ minutes to download. The patch was only 3.3MB! Nice of them to send that out right before everybody at the Blizz shop went home for the day. As usual, the 1.11.1 changes can be found in the Changelog section.

A couple of nights ago, we cleared BWL up to Nef, and I happened to get the [Netherwind Belt], which brings me up to 6 out of 8 on my set. All I have left are the [Netherwind Mantle] and the [Netherwind Robes]. Last night was way too laggy to attempt Nef, so we cleared MC in just over 3 hours. Tonight, he should be dead, and since one of the other mages can't make it on, I have about a 1.2% chance to get the robes (double drop... /me crosses fingers).

Site Updates:
I've been working on some new improvements for the site. One being an image gallery, and the other being a rewrite of the way the url is displayed. For the url thing, I just did this to try and learn a bit about mod_rewrite in Apache. As for the gallery, I'm using an embedded version of Gallery2, and I'll be making it live on the site sometime soon.

Well, on Tuesday we cleared Blackwing up to Nef, and we even got a decent pull on him. Last night, after a lagged-down wipe, and a mage-induced wipe (not me), we killed him again for the 2^nd week in a row. Here's what he gave us this time:
[Boots of the Shadow Flame]
[Breastplate of Wrath]
[Crul'shorukh, Edge of Chaos]
[Dragonstalker's Breastplate]


Also, the 1.11 test patch notes have been updated.

Finally, the Mages (and Shaman) have gotten their review! Test realm patch notes are available here.

Yesterday, I tracked down somebody to enchant my [Netherwind Gloves] with [Formula: Enchant Gloves - Frost Power] (woo!).

I've updated my Macros section to fit more with how I've done other parts of the site (using in-game UI graphics).

Last night, we killed Onyxia, cleared MC through Shazzrah, and made a couple of attempts on Chromaggus. Unfortunately, we only got him down to 4% and 10%, respectively, before calling it a night. Hopefully tonight we'll get him on the first try (Time Lapse and Incinerate, for those of you wondering) and have a night at learning more about the Nefarian encounter.

Loots: [Sapphiron Drape] from Onyxia

Wow, what a night we had in Blackwing Lair last night. We had pretty decent pulls on every boss, we killed up through Flamegor, and Netherwind was abundant. 3 pieces dropped, and I happened to get 2 of them!

[Netherwind Boots]
[Netherwind Gloves]

Current Netherwind Status: 5/8

Last night was a good night for us. We finished MC with Domo and Ragnaros, and in BWL we got Firemaw, Ebonroc, Flamegor, and did a naked pull on Chromaggus to see what our breaths were this time. My highlight of the night, getting my 3 piece bonus on Netherwind:

[Netherwind Pants]

Last night, Stormrage decided to go down. A lot of us rolled Alliance on the Dragonblight realm to help pass the time. After Stormrage came back up, raiding continued and we downed Ragnaros.

Shortly after that, those of us that could stay went on to killing Vael in a pretty lag-free BWL.

Here's my loot from last night:
[Azuresong Mageblade]

Last night was an... interesting night. We had lag, like normal for any realm maintenance day, and Vael was being stupid, so we went to MC. The guild decided to let some alts come along, and it didn't go so well, but the interesting part was when the Instance servers crashed.

All of a sudden, it seemed like the world was about to go down. People kept running off into mobs, Raystlyn was spinning in circles, spells weren't casting. The odd thing was that we could all still talk. Eventually, it booted everyone. After logging back in, we all found ourselves free-falling through the world and dieing. Upon releasing, we were all in Tarren Mill (People in BWL ended up in Stonetalon).

Now normally, when you die in an instance, release, leave the group and run into an instance, it instantly brings you back to life. This time, it just warped me back to Tarren Mill, thus forcing me to take a Spirit Res and repair all my gear. Oh well, I got some good loots tonight:

• [Netherwind Bindings]
• [Ring of Spell Power]