WoW Journal - 9-May-2005

Back from the holidays, and back to playing WoW on a desktop computer with ADSL connection. My apologies for the lack of updates, but with all that traveling I simply didn't have time to play. And I got a bunch of short business trips lined up for the next two weeks, which means even less time to play. But I'll take my laptop and test it's "mobile gaming" powers. :)

Saturday afternoon I log on with Raslebol, and am eager to make some xp, so I don't hit the cap of my rest bonus. I ask for a group in guild chat, and find that there is a group without tank heading for Maraudon. Great, even if that isn't my favorite dungeon. I head there immediately, forgetting to pack the staff which teleports the group into the middle of the dungeon. Doesn't matter, the others haven't got any of the Maraudon quests done, and need to walk all of it anyway. The mobs in the area before the instance gate are too low to give xp to a level 53, but once inside the experience points start rolling.

Maraudon is a huge dungeon consisting of several branches. The pre-instance zone has two different gates into the instance, leading to different branches, the orange zone and the purple zone. These two branches meet in the middle, leading to the final, biggest, green zone branch. If you kill the boss mobs of the two entry branches, you get two parts of the staff which allows you to teleport right into the middle.

So we took the purple zone entrance, and easily killed Lord Vyletongue for the diamond part of the staff. Then we continued and reached the middle of the dungeon. But then the rogue and the mage had to leave. But with me (warrior), a priest, and a shaman, we decided to continue into the orange branch, to get the second part from Noxxion. Doing this with three people is hard, especially the barbed lashers are nasty. But of course dividing the xp by only 3 left more of them for each of us, so we weren't all that unhappy. We managed to get up to Noxxion, a big water elemental boss mob. Unfortunately he had some nasty tricks up his sleeve, splitting up into several smaller elementals occasionally, then flowing together again. We simply couldn't handle him and got wiped so badly, that we decided to do it another day with a full group.

So I logged off, and installed GuildWars. Not that I was terribly eager to play it, but the game had arrived by mail during my holidays, and I'm planning to post a review here, so I needed to test it. I played all Sunday long, so I got enough material for at least a "first impressions" piece later this week. It's a good squad based, tactical combat PvP game, but a bit light on the PvE MMORPG side. More later.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:27 AM Permanent Link