Yesterday night my warlock hit level 60. Maruk has one that is 65 and he pretty much gathered all the materials for the 2 of us to do our Dreadsteed quest.

Eldar and Alena helped us complete the last part tonight. Thanks to them gratz to both of us.

It’s time to confess. I have reactivated WoW again on December 2. That thing just keeps pulling me back in. Alena has reactivated her account as well.

We’ve been doing a lot of heroic instances with friends, something that we haven’t done before and I find those a lot of fun. They present a nice challenge and offer some upgrades in gear, even though very minimal.

I have also brought up The UGH site back up and we’ve got some activity there. We actually have our first Karazhan raid scheduled for tomorrow. I don’t know how it will go, or if everyone will show up, but it looks promising. It’s going to be great to run things again with good in game friends and Eldar.

Another fun thing for me is my warlock that I made, named Hahz. He is level 54 now and the play style is completely different from a tanking warrior. I’m enjoying it a lot. I’m planning to do some PvPing with him and he’s going to be my farming machine.

Yesterday was a fun day. Well, apart from the visit to the ophthalmologist in order to figure out what’s going on with Danya’s eye (the diagnosis is “floaters”).

So after the 2-hours visit to the doctor, we met with Ignat, and took a D train to get to the Greek Gyro place located in Downtown Brooklyn. Now, if you know Danya personally, you probably heard him talking about that place. It could’ve been something like “the best gyro I ever had”, or “nobody can make the white sauce like those guys”, or “Ooo, I would so eat that gyro from Greeks now”, or… Read more…

The sun is setting down already and it just stopped raining. The sky is covered by a thick blanket of dark gray clouds. The mood is grim.

Two days ago we did something I didn’t think we’d ever do. We delete all of our characters in WoW, including our main ones, that we played for years. But this way we have no way back to something that became so frustrating and un-fun.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a sunny day.

Back to the topic of Warcraft. During the 2nd half of March Dnevnoi Dozor crumbled and shattered into nothing. Everything and everyone started running in all possible directions, so there are only 3 members in the guild now: Alena, Maruk and me. We’re basically back to where we started. Eldar left for Devil’s Horde and is currently running all their raids full time.

Alena and I canceled our accounts altogether back then, but I’ve been playing a bit lately. Leveling a couple of alts (primary my hunter, who I find a lot of fun), and Alena have been helping me with different stuff.

A week ago I got back on my warrior, run a couple of instances and did some quests with Eldar to improve my tanking gear. However what got me most excited during the past week is the fact that it actually became possible to get an epic flying mount (280% speed increase) which costs 5,000 gold. I remember struggling at putting together 1,000 gold for our land epic mounts, and now this. Anyhow, the speed at which I was able to collect it was nothing short of amazing, first of all to myself. I started with 1,700 and was at 5,000 at the end of Saturday.

What I did was very simple: I farmed and farmed for adamantite ore which I proceeded to break up into gems (JC Prospecting). On average I think I was about to get at least 1 rare gem out of 4 tries, which would sell for 60 - 70 gold each. In addition to that Alena helped me farm fire and air primals, which would sell for 30 gold each. And then we used her alchemy transmutation abilities to create several Earthstorm Diamonds, which sold for over a 100 gold each, which very minimal investment. Jewel crafting prospecting was the main part of it though.

So now I’m a proud owner of a Swift Red Windrider. I thought that I was going to wait for the Netherdrake, but it became quite clear that the reputation grind is going to take quite a while, me being a protection warrior. I can’t kill anything at all. Granted, they can’t kill me either, but that doesn’t get me very far. I think I’m going respect Arms for this grind if I want to achieve anything. Fury, even though my favorite, is too gear dependent, and gear I don’t have. So Netherdrake is my next objective.

P.S. Today I finally got my Karazhan key, thanks to Eldar and his friends from Devil’s Horde.

This is not something I’m really planning to do, and not something that I’ve signed up for, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking for some time about and it would be pretty cool if we could put it together one day. At least I think so.

I know that none of my friends have tried any game similar to this one before, but some of use got into it, and we enjoyed it for quite a bit. It started with me and Alena looking for a present for Maruk some time ago, and we got some cards for ourselves as well. Later on we showed it to Eldar, and he had his own set the next day. And recently I played a game with Lёnchik and he got a total kick out of it, and made us play with him every day since then, until he left for boot camp. Last time we saw him (a day before his birthday) we’ve got him several booster packs from the expansion set of the original game.

So if all 5 of us manage to get together somewhere at some point, I propose to play a small tournament with very simple rules that will go something like this:

• everyone brings 6 unopened booster packs
• all the booster packs go into some dark bag for a total of 30 booster packs
• each player pull out 4 random packs
• with the use of those pulled out packs player builds a 30 card deck (each booster pack has 15 cards)
• each match is judged by the results of 3 games
• first round everyone plays with all other players (4 matches for each player)
• second round 4 player compete for 2 spots in the final
• final round decides who wins the leftover 10 booster packs

From what I remember, the cost of 6 booster packs is going to be somewhere around $20. I think that’s something all of us can spare for a fun evening.

What do you think, guys?

Spent a whole night playing Rayman on Wii today with a lot of friends. At one point Maruk started making videos with his phone. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. The best one is of Ignat doing a dance.

P.S. First video post of ours, so excuse the sound quality. You have to make it quite loud to actually hear the background sounds.

Today we had a lot of fun playing Eldar’s new toy - Nintendo Wii. I actually wanted to try it out after learning about it from different sources - magazines, personal blogs and of course our friends. In fact, Maruks bought it a couple of weeks ago and were inviting us over to play, but we haven’t had a chance to visit them yet.

I like the whole concept of this game console - characters in the game imitate your movements. Well, kind of. A player has to hold a very sensitive remote control in one hand, so hand movements are reflected pretty accurately; other parts of the body are involved too, but the intensity of the movements depends on a game. You don’t really have to run, or jump, or do other silly stuff in order to score high. Unless, of course, you can’t help it!

I couldn’t quite imagine what it was like to play using Wii’s remote control before I tried it. And like the majority of the people who played, I must confess that muscles in my right hand feel pretty sore ( , who’s not working out?).

Looking at other people playing is fun too. The face expressions are sometimes hilarious! I don’t think that Wii is a valid substitute for a gym, but you certainly can burn some calories while enjoying this alternative gaming style.

I’m having a lot of fun leveling a new profession in the expansion. Before I never really got any use of any professions and never got it to any high level (blacksmithing), so I decided to drop it and go for Jewelcrafting. Wanted to do something that not only I would benefit from, but also my friends and guildies. I bought a lot of materials before the expansion came out and was able to get it to 300 on the first day.

After that was done we ventured into Outlands and started questing. With questing I was trying to mine, but there were no mines to be found. Too many people wanting the same thing made leveling further impossible. One of the guildies (Volltok) gave me a great tip about finding Fel Iron Ore. The portal into Outlands was the answer. The area around it has no mobs and is full of mines. Most people get there and leave right away by taking a flight. However I don’t know how long this will stay a secret, so if you need Fel Iron, try checking that area out.

I’m using Gatherer to make the note of all the nodes and then just ride in circles. You can usually get a lot of ore very quickly and skill up your mining as well. I’m at 375 now, by primarily hitting the nodes around that area.

The Jewelcrafting however is stuck at 345 at the moment. There is hard spot to get through. All the stone cutting recipes end on 325 and the next time you can get any useful skills are at 350. So I’m almost there, even though it’s taking me about 15 gems to get a single skill up. Either way, so far it’s been fun, doing something new.

Yesterday, my inner geekiness has suppressed whatever else “inners” I had. We went to a midnight release of Burning Crusade in Manhattan. Two out of 8 BestBuy stores doing a midnight release were located in Manhattan. We just went to the closest one. After waiting in line for about 15 minutes, we got inside the store, where we waited for another 15 minutes and got our games. Wasn’t bad at all.

We bought 3 Limited Edition versions and 1 regular edition. The limited ones will go to Eldar, Maruk and myself. Alena didn’t think we need to spend another $30 more in order to get a 2nd LE edition for us. So the adventure begins! Again.

Less then 7 hours is left until the official release of the first World of Warcraft expansion, Burning Crusade. We thought about going to a local store tonight (there are several in the area) for a midnight release, but it turns out you had to pre-order the game in order to get it tonight. Oh well, I guess we’ll just wait.

Before all of my UI stops working (which it always does with something changing in WoW) I wanted to post a current screen shot, and a list of mods I used. I’m not going to include the links, since they often change, sites seem to stop working, and versions constantly change, but you should be able to find them by searching on some of the popular sites such as Curse Gaming.

Out of the visible add-ons you have the following: (1) ag UnitFrames, (2) Titan Bars, (3) CT Viewport, (4) Simple Combat Log, (5) Drathals HUD, (6) Scrolling Combat Text, (7) Squeenix, (8) CT BuffMod, (9) Trinity Bars, (10) OmniCC (cooldown timers). The ones that are not visible, but still are a MUST: StanceSets, Grid (more for healing / decursing classes), Clique (same as one before), EquipCompare, CT Raid Assist, FastQuest (about to become needed again in the expansion) and DamageMeters. I’m sure I have left something important out, but these make the playing experience quite a bit nicer.

Either way, I hope we won’t have to wait way too long to find 2 copies of expansion. Jewelcrafting, level 70 and several other things await us!