The WoW Experience ft. Jamie: GAIDEN

I think I'm using that word right. Anyway, yes, anyone who knows me well probably won't be too surprised at this, because I am dumb and forget things. So this will be a post about stories from WoW that somehow I just forgot about while I was writing the series (PS the other posts, 1-4 should be in the archives section on the left). And there is also a small batch of screenshots that I found from the time at the end of Ravenous and the very beginning of Twisting Shadows, so I'll post some of those. The main feature of that set is my set of screenshots from when I explored the Karazhan Crypt in vanilla, which I'm really happy I found, because they're, in my opinion, some of the coolest shots I ever got. So anyway, let's get to it!

So the first thing, some people may have been wondering (I'm sure..), after Burning Crusade came out, what ever happened to my warlock? Well, the answer is actually kind of sad. See, to get healing enchants for my paladin, I needed an item called Primal Life. Lots of it. You could buy them, but they were also easy to farm, if you had enough time. The best place to farm for them was in Zangarmarsh, a level 62-63ish area. Warlocks were really good at farming, since they could pretty much infinitely sustain themselves with Lifetap and Drain Life, so I had my warlock farm up Primal Lifes for me. In the end, he got to level sixty-seven, only from killing regular, level 63 monsters. If that doesn't give you an idea, that takes a looooong time...

So I think I'll break up some the stories with the screenshots, since they are kind of stand-alone and don't really have any stories to themselves. First up is a screenshot that I just thought looked neat. I think I was just handing in thingies to get ZG rep.

Not very warlock-y...but whatever. We'll go with it.

So this next story probably won't mean much to anyone that wasn't there, but it's a funny story for me to remember. It takes place back in Twisting Shadows, when we were doing Blackwing Lair runs. on the last boss, Nefarian, if you didn't kill him in one go, you had to wait a while for him to respawn. I think this took around five to ten minutes. That may not seem like long, but when you've got 40 people running around in a room for ten minutes with nothing to do, it can be kind of significant.

So to pass the time, one of the guys in the guild, and I can't for the LIFE of me remember his name, but he would just sing random songs over Teamspeak. He was a pretty good singer, but the thing he wasn't so great at was remembering lyrics. So it was pretty hilarious to hear him singing the songs and then just making up lyrics as he went. They were usually pretty close, though. Like one day that I remember he was singing Fly Me To The Moon, and it went 'Fly me to the moon, let me..swing...amongst those stars'. I dunno it was just funny, really sticks out in my memory.

Okay time for another screenshot! This one is from when I went walljump exploring in Tanaris and got into the Caverns of Time, of course before it was officially released in BC. I don't know why I only took one screenshot...but it looked pretty much the same as it did when it released. Except that some parts were definitely unfinished...such as, apparently, the area I'm standing in below.

I don't know why the skull is on my head. Maybe the raid icons had just come out and we were playing with them.

So anyway, this next story takes place during the A Guild era, I'm pretty sure during a Black Temple run. It must have been during a time when we were farming, because we were having some pretty casual discussion in pally chat. Anyway, on this particular night, our illustrious guild leader Di decided to join pally chat. I'm not sure why, as he was a priest, but I guess he just wanted to keep tabs on strategies and stuff like that.

It just so happened though, that he entered the channel during the moment that we were talking about...midget hookers. Yeah....I'm...not really sure how we got there, but lamentably, it happened. It was one of those situations where he entered while a couple of people were already typing (myself included...) so we posted our messages before we realized he was there. After we posted our messages and realized what happened, there was just this silent moment where we all went 'uh oh'. And then on Vent Di just said 'Wow, I think I'm gonna like it in pally chat'. So we all had a good laugh about it, and Di stayed in pally chat from that day on.

MOVING ON THEN, this is just a cool screenshot from...one of the world events. I don't even remember which one! Well regardless, I thought it looks pretty sweet.

Eranikus, Tyrant of the Dream, in Moonglade. He looks kinda...jolly to be a villain, doesn't he?

So the next story is another one that only my guildies might get a little kick out of, but I just had to mention it; the words that are forever burned into my skull: X triangle square skull moon waffle. This was the sequence of raid icons that we were supposed to follow when killing groups of trash - focus x, then triangle, then square, etc. Waffle was the name we had for the orange circle, and was OBVIOUSLY the best name for it. 'Who's on waffle', 'kill waffle', and 'oh my god waffle is in the raid killing everyone' and stuff like that always made me laugh.

The other thing I loved about it was how our hunter who marked groups, Jad (you may remember him from such roles as guild leader of Massacre and Mass Anarchy), had an awesome southern accent, and so pronounced 'waffle' almost like 'waffow'. Actually, Jad pronounced a few things funny, like my paladin's name, Mateus. Most times he just called me Frost or Frosty, but when he occasionally said Mateus (pronounced 'ma-TAY-us'), he said it like 'MA-tee-us'.

Actually, speaking of that, wanna know why I named my pally Mateus? You might be wondering why I called my female paladin a male name, and it's a fair question! At the time, I didn't even know it was a male name. I actually named my pally after a summon from Final Fantasy. It (as far as I know) only appears in the Ivaliece games (FFXII and FFTA/A2), though in FFXII it's also considered a male. But in FFTA, where I first heard the name, Mateus was definitely (in my eyes) a female. Take a look.

Unless Mateus is actually the armor (which I suppose is a possibility), that definitely looks female to me.

So that image is from the FFTA strategy guide, and I was really stricken by it. So, I named my paladin after it! And just as a side-note, I'm pretty sure the strategy guide is the ONLY place that image exists. In fact for years I couldn't even find it on Google. I always found it so weird how such a beautiful piece of art was so hidden.

Anyway, this next screenshot actually kind of sucks, but it's special to me because it's the only surviving screen I have from my time in Twisting Shadows. It's right after we killed the Twin Emps, maybe for the first time.

A few familiar names in there: Vine (Reflex), Nerey, and Zoya in the corner!

Moving on to our next story, it's another one about walljumping. As I think I mentioned before, a bunch of us in Club Chorizo, our group of friends, liked exploring with walljumping. Outside Hyjal, in Caverns of Time, there was a pillar sticking out of the wall, too high to jump up on normally. And while it was possible to walljump up there, it was really tricky, even if you were pretty good at it. So on Hyjal nights, while we were waiting for everyone to gather for the raid to start, we would always have competitions to see who could get up there first. It was a fun way to pass the time waiting for the dawdlers to show up.

Another good one, one day for whatever reason, BT, Endal, and I decided to go walljump exploring inside Hyjal. Our main target was a giant mountain inside (if I remember right) the first camp where you fight the Lich and Dreadlord ('You are defenders of a doomed world! I want to eat your cereal, blah!') bosses. I don't even know why we wanted to get up there, whether we thought there was something on the other side, or we just wanted to get to the top. Either way, it looked possible, but ended up being a lot trickier than we thought.

It was pretty easy to get half way or even two-thirds of the way up, but from there it was slow going - we kept slipping back down. And the thing about walljumping, sometimes you fall down, a long way. I remember the whole time basically consisted of someone falling, then frantically calling for either me or BT to go down and resurrect them, because they didn't want to have to climb all the way back up after running back. But we didn't want to backtrack any either, so it was a constant struggle. The best part is, Endal kept forgetting to take off his armor, so every time he fell down and died, he lost a bunch of durability (and therefore money). In the end I think Endal got the closest to the top, but none of us ever made it.

This next screenshot features a weird graphical glitch, but also our good friend Stormchild. It seems as though he was trying to say the actual word 'frost' to me, but was having trouble.

My graphics card seemed to be in the same state as Storm's brain. *rimshot*

Next up we have a story about one of the bosses in Black Temple, Supremus. As the second boss in the raid, he was generally considered to be pretty easy, but somehow our guild managed to have our struggles against him. See, Supremus would shoot these fireballs at random raid members, that would stay on the ground for a short while after they landed. They did a tick of very significant damage every second or so to any character that was standing in them. So if you were quick, or, ideally, already running, you'd be able to take only one tick of damage when a fireball hit you, and you'd be fine. But take two or three ticks, and you were toast.

For some reason, our tanks seemed to have a strange disposition towards running straight through the fireballs on the ground. This would make them take several ticks of damage, which would often not even let them survive despite their high HP pools. I guess they just overestimated their survivability or something, since they were big fancy tanks. Anyway, after a particularly silly night of Supremus wipes, I decided to whip up a little diagram to help our good tank friends (who happened to both be tauren) remember what to do.

Follow the bunnies, guys. Just follow the bunnies.

Oh yeah, haha. See how Endal is saying that he loves Rvmech? He actually hated Rvmech, who was the main tank (and guild leader?) of one of Endal's guilds back on Eonar. Apparently, this guy only had one arm. Whenever his name came up, Endal went into a rant about how much Rvmech was a douchebag, but seemed to think he could get away with it just because he was 'differently abled'. So obviously we brought it up as often as we could.

Now here's my last random screenshot, which shows what happens when you combine size-enhancing buffs. That is completely unedited - I think it was a combination of a halloween buff and one of the just-for-fun engineering items.

Frostor regretted his steroid use when his horns fell off.

And now for my final story, which might be my favourite story ever. It takes place during the A Guild era, while we were waiting for a BT raid to start. We found a world boss, Doomwalker, outside the entrance to BT, and decided to give him a go for fun. We picked up some random players from the zone since we didn't have a full raid yet, but thought it would be fine, as the fight was pretty straight forward. One of Doomwalkers attacks was chain lightning, which, as the name suggests, gets cast on one person, then bounces to anyone else nearby, then bounces again, and so on. Doomwalker's chain lightning, however, got stronger after each bounce.

So, rule two was to stay spread out. Rule one was, of course, to stay the HELL away from the main tank, Endal in this case. If he got hit with chain lightning, the combination of that and Doomwalker's standard damage would easily kill Endal, and spell a wipe. Unfortunately, one of the random players we picked up didn't get the message, and on one of the attempts, Endal got hit by chain lightning and got killed.

Now this particular player's name was Preggymeggy, a female tauren. Endal was so mad at the wipe that he typed out in chat 'PEGGY', which to me was a hilarious typo. So anyway, the raid proceeded to wipe and we all ran back to get ready to try again. But something strange was happening. Venth was laughing. If you didn't know, Venth was a really gruff, no-nonsense kind of guy. I don't think I'd ever even heard him snicker before that, let alone laugh out loud. We asked what was so funny.

So you have to imagine here that Venth is explaining this through bouts of laughter. He said that the reason that chain lightning did so much damage to Endal was that it got an extra bounce off of the fetus in Preggymeggy's womb. Now, I don't know how funny that is to you reading it right now, but at that moment, Vent (our VoIP program, not Venth) just absolutely EXPLODED with laughter. Everyone just went nuts. I think it took like ten or twenty minutes to get the raid back together because everyone was recovering. That was probably the funniest thing that ever happened in WoW for me, and one of the funniest things I ever experienced in my life.

So, that's it for the stories today! There's a decent chance that I will remember more as time goes on, so I'm hesitant to say that this is going to be the last WoW post. As promised, I'll leave you with the series of screenshots from my foray into Karazhan Crypts. To get in, I exploited a glitch (that was fixed soon after this took place, I believe) that allowed player ghosts to pass through some gates. So I killed myself right next to the gate blocking the entrance, walked through as a ghost, and resed on the other side. Good times.

I should point out that this place was legitimately creepy to explore. You may notice I have my detect invisible buff on, just in case. Anyway, here we go.

You started out falling down a looong way (that I used Noggenfogger to survive) onto that giant bone pile. Nice welcome.

I think it was supposed to be 'Tomb'? Unless there was supposed to be a tome in here or something.

Upside-down Sinners? What does that even-

...oh. Ohhhh...

Another typo? Should be 'Despair', I imagine. Unless there's some guy called Dispair. Hm!

Just the 'Crypt'. Even just the mounds of dirt manage to be unsettling.

Another area of the 'Tome'. Those look like tombs to me.

Another area of the Crypt. The low ceiling and seemingly raised floor made this area really claustrophobic.

This area kinda looks like the part of release Kara before Nightbane, doesn't it?

So those are all the screenshots I got. I have no idea why Blizzard never used this area, it was so cool and atmospheric. Maybe what they had planned was too dark/disturbing for the ESRB rating they wanted. Who knows!

Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed. See you tomorrow!