Red Rider Air Rifle? I wonder if at this point this is a reference to the original, to the Christmas Story, or to Wasteland…

And when the dust settled, we had killed him – on our first attempt of the night.

A well deserved victory, and a joyous event; even if I did not have enough DKP for Glorenzelg.

At the end of the fight only one burning question remaind: What the hell are we gonna do for the rest of the week?

]]> http://nilsjeppe.com/2010/09/10/lich-king-is-finally-down/feed/ 2 http://nilsjeppe.com/2009/05/01/vanity-search/ http://nilsjeppe.com/2009/05/01/vanity-search/#comments Fri, 01 May 2009 04:00:02 +0000 Nils http://nils.jeppe.de/?p=1080 Richard, I see your 34 matches and counter with 46 players named “Jeppe” in Europe and 9 in the American World of Warcraft.

(Of course “Jeppe” is a fairly common name in Scandinavia, especially in Denmark.)

Raids take on challenges that’d be much too hard for smaller groups. Naxxramas – a floating, undead citadel – was the primary raid in the current content; last week, Ulduar was added. Ulduar is a fortress inhabited by titans.

After joining raids fro some weeks now, I’ve gotta say: I am kind of glad I did. They are much more interesting and challenging than small-scale encounters. They require 25 people to work well together; there’s a leadership structure (though we’re kind of casual about it) and people have more specialized roles. Everybody needs to do their job well; a weak link means a wipe – death of the entire raid. For example, on one boss in Naxxramas, I have to use my hunter’s ability to set freezing traps to help neutralize a large group of zombies, and I have to use my tranquilizing shot to calm down the boss when he becomes enraged. Positioning is much important as well. In short, it’s much more about tactics than most other fights.

It’s really fun to do this. Naxxramas is a bit too easy, but Ulduar is very tough for us. This is in part because it’s just a hard area, but it’s also because we’re still learning how to defeat the bosses there. There is immense satisfaction in taking on a big, bad monster, failing for many attempts, and then finally working out the right approach for a successful victory.

Very gratifying.

Razorscale - Ulduar 10-man

• Zone design is great, the zones look really nice.
• Quests are much less annoying – there are of course still FedEx- and kill-ten-grue-type-quests, but over all it is MUCH more imaginative, and has many nice extras (for example there’s a quest to free Murloc babies, which has got to be ones of the cutest things in a video game ever).
• Death Knights are actually a fun melee class, which I had not thought would ever happen; their starter “campaign” is also really well designed.
• Less reputation grind… it seems.

The bad:

• It’s more of the same. Really. If you have played WoW at all, you have played the expansion. Unless you are a WoW ultra-nerd, you should get tired of it really quickly.
• Inflation got knocked up another notch. My mage made 500g profit, just by questing, in three days of game-play.
• It absolutely sucks to be a new player at the moment, or to play a low level character. Unless you are level 70 or higher, and thus able to consume the WOTLK content, you will play this game alone for a long time.

Bottom line:

Wotlk gets 3/5. This is what the first expansion should have been like – Northrend totally puts Outland to shame. There’s enough to keep the old timers happy for a while, and some of the new additions are quite nice, but it is not compelling enough to warrant anything more than a “for fans” recommendation.