Military ranks of computer problems.

Back in the day when Windows 95 was king, I had a good military friend on my computer. His rank and name was General Failure and he really liked reading disk. I haven't heard from the general for a while, but it seems I have found a new friend.

His name is Major Lag and he likes to hang around when I try to play WoW.

Today I wanted to login to my normal WoW account, maybe throw some snowballs at people, maybe do some PvP - to no avail. Each time I logged on, Major Lag would show up. My latency would skyrocket to the regions of 10000ms (yes, 10 seconds for a response) and the server would keep dropping me out. Major Lag was also around when I tried playing The Burning Crusade but his influence was not so dramatic - just around the usual 800ms I get on the beta servers.

It was time to rise and live again for Quba, the Orc who cannot level.

Rise and shine Mr. Freeman... *cough* Mr. Orc...

I was planning to do a longer session tonight, but it appears some Ally Paladin managed to level all the way to 70, get an epic flying mount and decided it is time to make other's lives miserable. I kept on getting ganked (so pissed off I did not even take screenshots), and soon I logged out.

Still, there are couple of points I did not cover yet from my previous session, and a bunch of screenies I took that may as well constitute to a nice new post here.

First of all - a correction. I am not sure where the name Fel Orcs came from. Maybe that is the race, maybe not. After inspecting the screenshots I found out that the characters are described as Bonechewers. This could be the clan name for the redskins, or racial name - I am not really sure. Just wanted to mention that.

Bonechewer indeed. Mmmmm, bones...

One of the quests I attempted, or shall I say, one of the quests I actually managed to complete, required me to collect scraps of wood and metal from some wreckage guarded by the Bonechewers. yet again, the reward blew my mind. Green leg plates, level 60 totally outranked my old pants. I did not have any purple in that slot, only Abyssal Plate Legplates of Striking but getting 100 extra armor, 4 more strength and agility and 15 more stamina points isn't bad for a quest that takes approximately 10 minutes to complete.

Old and new leg pieces compared

All I can hope for is that when Burning Crusade comes out, people will not get too obsessed with racing forward. I still didn't have a chance to raid Blackwing Lair (well, went there solo once, needless to say I did not last very long), I still haven't seen Naxxramas - I have a bad feeling that many players will not want to bother with these once the expansion comes out. Of course, the drops from what is now the end-game raid content will be obsolete in a month's time, but the experience will still be there!

Anyway, back to the topic.

Another neat addition in the interface I noticed is dynamic quest objectives display. As you know, SHIFT-clicking on the quest title in the log allows you to display the objectives on your screen. In Burning Crusade the mechanic of this system got well thought of improvement. Once you complete an objective of the quest (even if you are not tracking it), the list of objectives will automatically display on the screen for a while (around 1 or 2 minutes I believe).

It is really useful, especially when you pick up 25 quests and don't want to search which one that particular flower you just picked was good for and what other objectives were there.

Unyielding Knight, just like a bad driver

In an earlier post about Outland, I mentioned the ruins populated by the ghostly undead. This particular group of baddies goes by the name of Unyielding and is not too tough to kill (as long as I managed to pull one or maximum of two at the time). One of the more fun mobs are the Unyielding Knights who fight you mounted. I cannot recall anything similar in the earlier WoW content - mobs would always dismount before the fight, and either attack you solo or assisted by their beast. Of course this is just a model of an enemy, much like the centaurs, but makes an interesting difference in the gameplay.

Of course, it also makes me long for the ability to actually perform some basic attacks without the need to dismount from my good old wolf.

Outland is filled with interesting "bonuses" - either for the player to participate in, or just watch. After one of my unfortunate resurrections I stumbled upon a following scene: A poor guy, Arcanist Torseldori getting attacked by dozens of Infernal Invaders. I did not manage to take a very good shot of the scene as I was running from quite far away to witness the fight. The fight itself lasted good 3-5 seconds, after which Mr. Torseldori obviously had some cleaning up to do.

Arcanist Torseldori and dozens of Infernal Invaders attacking him

Arcanist Torseldori and a pile of dead rubble

Well, that's it from me for today. I will perhaps attempt to log on again, maybe my pally nemesis is gone and I can finally complete that capturing towers quest.

No Burning Crusade blog could be possibly complete without some snapshots of Fel Reavers - these huge monsters (machines?) roam the surroundings of Thrallmar and tend to freak me out, somehow managing to sneak up on me. Did not fight any yet - I usually stay away from things that are taller than my house and have a skull for a level number.

I hope you enjoyed this installment of my Blog. Please drop me a comment about what you like and dislike in my articles, what would you like to see and read about. I am all for answering your questions, but with virtually zero feedback on the blog it is tough for me to figure out what the audience is and what you may want.