What I had time to Fraps before my PC broke - again!

The title says it. Here are the most recent Menagerie raid videos from Siege of Orgrimmar. I would most certainly record more, as Menagerie is nearly at Garrosh, but Saturday morning my PC showed no signs of life. Therefore it's leaving home yet again to be fixed, if it can be fixed that is. It may be that they will just give me a new individual. In fact I hope they finally would.

Either way, I am working on building a supermachine of my own. My budget is around 1500 euros and I'll probably get around to buying stuff around the change of year. If you have any suggestions for what pieces I should consider, I'd love to know! I'll just say that I'd like to go for nVidia this time, instead of AMD Radeon.

Back, not quite in business though

Turns out I was able to reinstall and run WoW on my terribly bad old laptop, "craptop", after updating as many of its drivers as I was able to. As expected, the play experience is far from desirable with less than 10 FPS standing still in an empty room. As you have probably already figured, raiding is not an option for me before I get my primary PC back. Until then, I may redirect you to my attempt to maintain a personal blog number infinite+1, called That Rogue's Broken Keyboard and Other Lame Excuses. Despite the name, it's pretty much Finland-exclusive.

Lanfranco and I were responsible for this year's April fool's guild message of the day in Menagerie. A Menagerie ghost roleplay event was to be arranged in Hearthglen, Western Plaguelands (a very strategic location for Menagerie). Everyone taking part would be required to remain dead throughout the event. The idea of ghost RP first came up in a humorous recruitment advertisement we posted in the Moonglade trade chat once. Last year's April fool's message asked everyone to add 'lol' in the end of each message they posted in guild chat, or they would get a warning.

It's likely I won't be posting anything to Adventures while in England (9th - 24th of April), but when I return, I will have my good computer back. Below is yet another video that gets posted late.

I wasn't sure if I would ever post the next one, but decided to do so anyway. It's my first ever, and due to technical difficulties, also my only experience in the solo dungeon loot scenario...whateverthedevil thingy. I'm looking forward to doing smoother loot runs in the future!

Sha of Fear video

This one is indubitably a bit late. I uploaded it in a hurry and immediately went to pick up my visitor, who stayed with me for a week, so there hasn't been any time to update the blog. My life is now, sadly, back to normal again.

The visitation had a perfect timing, because Menagerie managed to clear the current content on the last raid day that my visitor and I could attend. We missed out on two Throne of Thunder raids, but as I get back to the world of raiding on Sunday, there will be more raid videos soon enough. I have been busy and more or less exhausted the entire day, but I am certainly looking forward to experiencing the Isle of Thunder and everything else that 5.2 has to offer.

Tsulong & Lei Shi videos

Pushing through four new bosses during the same lockout is definitely our record!

HoF & ToES videos

Here are some recent Menagerie raid videos from Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring.

That Garalon we love

Who would grow tired of watching a berserk as awesome as Garalon's, anyway?

We've got this... Really...!

As we got around to doing our usual Wednesday Mogu'shan Vaults run, suddenly after the Stone Guards I got the idea of recording our raiding for the first time since Dragon Soul, from where we sadly don't have much better material than the Kalecgos part of the Madness of Deathwing Chromatic Champion achievement, a (very stylish indeed) heroic Morchok clip and some early Dragon Soul progression kills like Zon'ozz, Yor'sahj, Hagara and Ultraxion with the classic bad screaming, despite clearing the raid on heroic mode. Those videos actually make me miss Dragon Soul, heh. The oldest raid video of us, known as "Shannox now", dates back to early Firelands and, well, Shannox, Rageface and Riplimb.

We are well past our progression phase in normal mode Mogu'shan Vaults, but my sudden idea to Fraps the raid really messed with our heads. Before beginning, I told everyone how we should portray ourselves: we mustn't stand in poop, we mustn't die, we mustn't go out of mana, we mustn't do anything stupid! We mustn't do anything that wasn't what I did. For long I've thought I don't really tunnel vision, but after Feng, well, I am humbled. Please do enjoy this exclusive content of a Menagerie raid that was by far the most fun raid I have attended. We sure didn't live through our smoothest kills in history, but people were positive all the way from the first second to the last and beyond, which was really spectacular and made me incredibly happy. It really reminded me of why I fell in love with raiding in the first place.

I just wish Fraps had been running when the Eye of Kil'rogg made the first pull on Gara'jal the Spiritbinder.

Then came the time for the most flawless Elegon kill.
"Did you record that?"
"Nope."
"...You're kidding me?"
"Nope."

This is just one of those times when I try to say that you guys mean a ton to me.

A mixed post!

I thought I'd start this month's posts with a beta one, particularly since there have been lots of new stuff added to it since the latest patch. Pet battles and all that stuff. I found out the beta post would have been way more text than screenshots, so this'll be a very mixed post. I meant to post it days ago already, actually, but things have come up.
I know July wasn't a very active month posting-wise, compared to the previous two. It's because I haven't been very inspired about WoW, and lots of unfortunate events have taken place. I'm definitely not going to quit playing WoW or anything, I'm just taking a silent break while maintaining all guild things as usual.

Part V of the story of Vlad is probably one of the things that will be out pretty soon, followed by part VI, which is intended to be the last part of the story. However, it will not be the last part of Vlad's story altogether - I've began to really like him as I've progressed with the story, so he'll be heard from.

Beta things start here, so spoiler warning.

Alright, let's get to Pandaria things. It's been a while since I've been to the beta. The first thing I noticed was a new launcher. I liked the old one better, because it was wooden. There was also a Pandaria loading screen, which I thought I screenshot, but didn't.

With my beta-shaman Nicasia I spawned extremely close to the newly introduced farming place in Valley of the Four Winds. What people mistakenly call the Farmville of World of Warcraft is actually much closer to the Harvest Moon of World of Warcraft with the Best Friends system and all. It is indeed a new minigame that lets the player take care of their own farm: plant and harvest crops, earn seeds and other rewards, build relationship with the various NPCs around the ranch, get gifts from them and take care of various issues around the farm. It's related to the Tillers faction.

I'm not sure whether I like this myself or not, but the most wonderful thing about the minigames is YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DO THEM IF YOU DON'T WANT TO. I wish everyone understood this. Plus it's in Pandaria, and a Pandaren thing. It's not like it's going to be a part of Stormwind City's dailies. Just don't adventure into Pandaria if it makes you sick. Let the Pandaren live their lives, and live yours somewhere else. Or consider it a holiday in China, with some Chinese tourists elsewhere in the world.

As most of World of Warcraft's players are casual ones - those that want to log on every now and then and do something, minigames like these are very understandable. They add to the casual player's to-do list, which before Pandaria included mainly questing, dailies and some dungeoning, perhaps PvP. I won't get into all the things I hate about the raid finder, but it's also one of those things for the casual players.

See that libram? It didn't show as I inspected the items, so it's a special thing. I have no idea where or how one can get it, but I think it's awesome! And that paladin PvP set, too, is one if my favorites paladin sets so far. To me it has a Judgement-like feel to it. To avoid confusion, the malevolent set was transmogged into the dreadful one, hence the inspection looks different.


I found a capturable pet in the Valley of the Four Winds, but I couldn't battle it, because I was stuck in combat for some silly reason that I couldn't figure out.

At times it is and has been very difficult to get through these last months of Cataclysm. I'm pretty sure that when September hits, though, we'll be very close to the pre-MoP events. And because of that, I recommend everyone to visit the good old Theramore Isle while they still can.

Here are some more screenshots of unimportant things.

I had my first Panda greenie drop!

I like this helmet in a twisted way.

PvP shield - trollish voodoo stuff.

Shiny paladin.

A very cute worm!

Do not show this to Rivendare

I wish to share just how bad my sense of humour actually is. It wasn't even in the heat of the moment that I made this video, but I planned it from the start. The mounts featured in the video are Deathcharger's Reins' that drop from the final boss of Stratholme, Lord Aurius Rivendare (previously Baron Rivendare, who can post-Cata be found in Naxxramas only).