Master of Tol Barad

Finally!  Tol Barad is complete!  Going into Friday, I needed only 5 more wins to get Tol Barad Veteran, which in turn would get me Master of Tol Barad.  It took all day, since the games were at least 2 hours apart and the Alliance won some of them, but I dun did it.

I’m glad I finished this zone before MoP gets released; I haven’t seen more than 10 Horde queue up for this BG in the past week.  Now I wish I could have completed Wintergrasp when it was current.  It takes forever now to build up kills and run the siege engines to the bring down the walls in Wintergrasp that it’s practically not worth it, especially if you’re the only one in the zone. Oh well.

Since I plan on not coming back here (unless SR wants a Alizabal guild kill), I took a couple of screenshots before I left the zone:

Warden’s Vigil

Slagworks

Ironclad Garrison

Mo Problim

For you pet and mount collectors out there, don’t forget that you can get the Rustberg Gull, the Reins of the Spectral Wolf and the Reins of the Drake of the West Wind with the commendations that you earn by doing the dailies in the zone.  I had some leftover commendations and forgot that the vendor sold this trinket, the Baradin Grunt’s Talisman.  I believe he can aid you in attacking mobs for a short duration, but I didn’t get to test it out.

Baradin Grunt’s Talisman

Now I won’t ever have to worry about zoning in here anymore!  Yay!!

Wait…..there’s a Fox Kit pet that drops in this zone, you say???  #$%^&!!!

Goodbye, Tol Barad……or is it?

What’s your favorite Blizzard cinematic or cutscene?

This was a question posted by WoW Insider in one of their Breakfast Topics last week.  The only one that come to my mind as the most memorable so far in my WoW experience would definitely be Thrall’s Kamehameha.

Lol, not really, but seriously the one cutscene that sticks out has to definitely be the Fall of the Lich King.

I still believe that WotLK is the best expansion so far and to finally put the Lich King to rest was a culmination of a lot of things for SR.  To see that cutscene after all the guild went through, the heartache, the frustration, the countless fish feasts, the sleepless nights…it was all worth it.  The vent chatter exploded with cheers, even as the cutscene was playing.  I don’t think I went to sleep for another two hours after I had logged off and boy did I pay for it at work the next morning, lol.  But you know what, it was all worth it.

So what’s your favorite Blizzard cinematic or cutscene?

Hanging out with the Frostees

Wednesday morning, I got up early to raid with Navimie and the Frostwolves.  They tried to see if they could get me into Vault of Archavon, but I guess that raid instance is server-only, so we ended up going to Blackwing Descent instead.  We had me, Navimie, Azalpha, Biship, Jinjersnaps, Lushnek, Mctacky, Roshii, Sevros and Souglyy in the raid.  Their vent was pretty entertaining, as it was pretty similar to Shadow Rising’s chatter, only with Aussie accents. =)

We tried to do Heroic Magmaw, but the encounter was pretty hectic, even for our gear levels.  so we decided to clear that on normal.

Next was the Omnotron Defense System.  We didn’t attempt that on heroic, but most, if not all of us, needed to not get hit by the Arcane Annihilator to get Achieve-a-tron.  We had several tries and kept messing up the interrupts on Arcanotron, but on the last attempt, the encounter bugged out and Electron was the only construct active the whole fight, so we burned him down and got our acheesement.

We then went over to Chimaeron and blew him up on heroic.

We then tried to get Heroic Atramedes and the Silence is Golden achievees, but it got too crazy to do both at the same time, so we just downed him on heroic.

It got late for some of the Frostees, so me, Navi and Jinjer did a couple of BGs.  We won a GSA (Gilneasucksass), almost 5-capped an Arathi Basin and lost a Warsong Gulch in the final mintues.  All in all, it was pretty fun morning for me.  Thanks again guys for letting me raid with you all and grats on everyone’s achievees.  Now I’m gonna go check out the new Spiderman movie with Chewy.

Evolution of a Video Gamer

I’ve been a video gamer all my life, most of it on consoles.  I can remember the day when my parents bought us our first NES system.  My brother and I played the crap out of that.  We would play RC Pro-Am, Excite Bike, Mario, Tecmo Bowl and many other games all day along.  We played so much that we became Masters of Making the NES Game work, which included such techniques as the Slide-the-Cartridge-Just-Over-the-Lip-then-Push-Down technique, the Bang-the-Side-or-Top-of-the-Machine technique and the one the never seemed to fail for us, the Blow-the-Cartridge-Under-your-Shirt technique.  My first RPG was Final Fantasy and I played it with my strategy guide and map all out on the floor while my little sister watched, wondering what the heck I was doing.  Super NES, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, Game Boy…you name it, I’ve pretty much played it.

Computer games at the time were a small facet of my gaming but I always favored the console more.  I remember playing the Oregon Trail on those ancient computers in grade school, hunting endlessly for food, yet still ended up dying from starvation.  At home, I killed baddies in Commander Keen, completed all the levels in the original The Incredible Machine and mastered the skies and took down planes in Aces of the Pacific.

 

I guess it only made sense that I ended up working at a video game store and Best Buy throughout high school/college.  I accumulated a lot of old systems and games while working there.  I even still have the Sega Dreamcast with its Star Trek-esque controller (MvC2, FTW!).  I spent endless nights and early mornings, grinding out deathmatches in Golden Eye, Perfect Dark and Halo.  Definitely good times.

And then there was Warcraft.  One day working at Best Buy, I noticed a Collector’s Edition of Warcraft III on the shelf.  I read the description on the back the box and decided to give it a try.  Boy, did I have a blast!  You mean I get to command units and send them out into battle while fortifying my base?  Sweet!  I ended up getting The Frozen Throne expansion pack too when it came out, but unfortunately never finished either game.

I enjoyed the Warcraft universe so much that even though I had stopped playing the PC game, I kept myself immersed into the comics, toys and trading card game.  Then a RL friend of mine, Chewy (SR members will also know him as Stunnah), said if I had all this Warcraft stuff, why wasn’t I playing World of Warcraft?  I really debated against it; I wasn’t interested in paying a monthly fee for a PC game when I was more into the console stuff.  It took a while and lots of persuasion from Chewy, but I finally caved in.  So I entered the world of Azeroth in August 2008, got immediately hooked and the rest is history.

Today, I spend more time on the PC than I do on my Xbox  360 or PS3, mainly on WoW.  I love playing the game, playing it with friends, meeting new ones, exploring it on my own and yes, even pvpeeing, lol.  Looking forward to exploring Pandaria with my friends!