Monday, June 15, 2009

Ctrl Alt WoW Episode 119 - IRL The Fifth Continent of Azeroth

Aprillian, Glanthur and Ashayo discuss another week of playing World of Warcraft, Blizzard's great MMORPG. Contest Ongoing send an email to ctrlaltwow@gmail.com telling us how you play WoW, either as an altaholic or dealing with it in your family life to being placed in a drawing for a month free of WoW or a $10 iTunes Gift Card or an Authenticator, they are back in the store.

Europe can get the iphone/ipod touch app on the store

What We've Been Doing:



Excited about:
AIR DATES
August 21-22, 2009

Internet Pay Per View includes:



* Over 16 hours of live Internet streaming coverage

* Exclusive interviews and commentary

* Exclusive interviews and commentary

* Main stage presentations including opening ceremony

* Tournament coverage and team highlights

* BlizzCon 2009 exclusive World of Warcraft in-game pet, Grunty the Murloc Marine.*

Mid Summer Fire Festival Starts 6/21

Aprillian


Finally hit on 300 on mining/skinning and herb. Headed out to Outland, going silly ways. Having a hard time deciding home places.

Did Hellfire Ramparts and .. with Grimrok and Pird. Excellent run. Good loot, every toon I had dinged.

Fri morning Power trained V in Enchanting, got her from 70 to 240. Used mats bought on ally AH with pet money.

Ran RFK and RFD with Mibechina had a blast.

Took my alliance toon to Exador to get an elephant. While there, I decided to see if I could find a blood elf mask, and found the blood elf almost right away and he dropped the mask. Amazing.

Getting ganked while doing Neutral AH is a pain.

Ashayo

Oracle Report: 3 x white tickbird, 1 x proto-drake whelp (still miss a heart beat when I get the whelp)

Ashield & Anomander in Borean Tundra. Anomander hit 70 - first DK to do so.
Engineers can "mine" mechanicals to get some basic engineer mats, such as handful of bolts.
Deadlyvyv has taken up tanking. Healed Nexus on pally.

Bought an Elwynn Lamb off neutral AH for 1800g - bargain!

Asheal 25-man naxx - tier shoulders to make 4-set bonus. Maui & I managed to 2-priest Instructor Razuvious
Killed Thaddius after he enraged (normally is insta-wipe)
Full clear again. (Welcome back Onassi!)

Ashayo 25-man Ulduar - Flame Leviathan, X2, Kologarn, Razorscale, Ignis the furnace master
Heroic: Shattered - Defeat Ignis after shattering 2 Iron Constructs within 5 seconds
The Siege of Ulduar - 4 bosses
No cloth ; a caster ring - rolled a 7. go me!

Power Auras Classic mod ; http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/powerauras-classic.aspx

Plenty of Pants on Head fun. Ran Blood Furnace again with some low 60's. Shadowthrone hits 68 - and is off to Northrend!

Hiide's pet bear was untalented. Noticed after I kept wiping on Chillmaw after the pet died.

Lowbie action! Ran Zul Gurub on my mage. The turtle polymorph book dropped, but as there were 4 mages, I passed. But I did win Hakkar's heart, which is a nice trinket.
Run through Maraudon by Retsmile with Solador and Ostira on alts. Soooo rusty on the shaman!

Power Auras Classic mod ; http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/powerauras-classic.aspx

Glanthur

- Got to level 67 on Arlaerum
- A couple more days until the Argent Hippogriff
- Missed a lot of raids due to real-life

Bladed Edge


Hey all, Blade here...
First... allow me to be JUST a little controversial... it seems that the upcoming patch changes bode well for mounts.
Your first mount (the +60% speed one) will be obtainable at level 20. For a LOT less gold than we paid way back in the day...
Yeah... level 20.
Why not "right away upon character creation"?
Apparently THAT would make things "EASY"...
The 100% land speed mount will be available at level 40... yes level 40... for a lot less gold than we paid for it way back in the day...
Ahh... Ol' Blade remembers when level 40 was THE level to get to... 'cause THAT was when you got your 60% mount.
And it was awesome.
Ah well... what's the point of working towards goals anymore, right?
But I was gnashing about mounts... back to that...
Wait for it... it gets better.
The slower of the two flying mounts (the one that we bought at level 70 that flew at an abysmally slow 60% land speed) will now fly at 150% of your land speed (60% while on the ground), cost significantly less than they did before - with prices being conditional to the faction reputation levels - and is available AT 60!
Yes... you heard me... level 60 is the new flying mount level-to-reach.
Gee... I wonder what class spurred THAT little amendment to the game...
The 280% (and up) speed flying mounts are still a level 70 property... with faction reputation affecting the prices here as well.
Anyone else feel like they're spoon-feeding us?
I mean... okay... granted... places like Outland are a little tedious to get around when you only have a 60% land speed mount... but who goes there before 60 these days anyway?
Give me a break... What player CAN'T get to level 20 in just under a few hours if they push? Half a day of play and you have you mount already!
A few more days in, and you're riding faster! Level 60 and you can fly!
Think about all the content in Outland that people are going to skip over because they simply cannot see it. That somewhat-treacherous run between Hellfire Peninsula and the Zangarmarsh? Not so threatening anymore when you can fly over the whole enchilada after a few measly quests in Hellfire... assuming you didn't stay in vanilla Azeroth until 60.
Apologies, True Believers, it's not often Ol' Blade gets a burr in his side about these things... but how much easier can they make things?
What's next?
Every new toon rolled gets a free level 80 epic weapon... JUST for being a Death Knight?
I mean... should we now THANK all the QQing Death Knight players who are kvetching their little hearts out that they couldn't fly in Outland as soon as they rolled their characters?
(oops... and non-DKs... let me not be discriminatory to those who play characters who actually have to do more for dps output than /rollface on their keyboards...
Although... the murmurings on the wind say that a certain kind of Shaman can melt the face of an equally-geared DK...
Was there a sudden patch change that Ol' Blade missed? Or are Shammy players uncharacteristically quiet about their buff... so as to both AVOID the nerf bat (when other classes QQ) and PWN the DKs at their leisure?
Mysterious... Ol' Blade's gonna find this elusive Death Shaman and get the dirt on them...
Get it? Dirt? Earth totems?
/sigh

Ah well...

Onward!

From the Dirty Little tricks Department...
Let's talk professions... everyone knows (or should know) that in order to make decent amounts of money (at least BEFORE Blizzard made making gold so easy that all you have to do now is /roll your face on your keyboard...
Wait...
Is THAT why people made Death Knights? To make easy money?!?
It all makes SENSE now!
...
Well not really...
But... these days... with daily quests all OVER the place... it's SO easy to make gold that it's not really worth having two gathering professions... and maybe that's why Blizzard planned it that way...
Not a lot of trick this week... this time Ol' Blade is going to leave it up to you... you gotta do a little snooping on your own... but there's TONS of websites out there that
Awww... fine... here's a few items that are rather invaluable for certain classes at certain levels for certain quests...
For the lower-levels... let's look at engineering... the Deadly Blunderbuss is always an item that is sought after, as it is a quest-item requirement for a quest in Ashenvale... at least it is on Horde side... it's been a long time since I did anything in Ashenvale with the Alliance other than pwn the Astraanar guards...

orc.mp3

For you tailor-types... Warlocks need a robe called 'Robes of Arcana' in order to complete a quest chain to acquire a fairly decent at-level cloth item called Enchanted Gold Bloodrobe... Aprillian should recall where to pick up the pattern for the Robes of Arcana...
Jewelcrafters... as soon as you can, buy the pattern for ANY of the epic rings or necklaces with your daily quest Jewelcrafting Tokens... the price difference between the materials (even bought off the Auction House) and the final Auction-sold rings (or necklaces) is still really nice... especially if you;re a few thousand gold short of buying whatever it is you need several thousand gold to guy...
Pretty much ANY epic armor or weapon will make a blacksmith SOME money... the prices have come down a little since the launch of the Lich King expansion, but dropping the occasional Titansteel Destroyer onto the Auction House is still a decent side revenue if you don't have the game time to sit and do tons of daily quests...
The trick here, folks, is to find a small niche... and explot--- err... milk it. It may not make you a constant stream of money, it may make you money only once before the revenue from it dries up... but there's money to be gained by people who are willing to spend it.
The trick is... giving them what they want and making them think it's invaluable.

Onward!

From Ol' Blade's Easter Egg Basket...
For a bit of nosthalgia... Ol' Blade's taking you back to the old world...
Waaaaaaay back in the days before Northrend and arenas... heck... even Blood Elves and Space Goats... err.. Draenei... the profession skill maximum level was 300. Now that's not all THAT remarkable, except when you stop to think about the fact that there were two NPC mobs in the game that required a skinning skill level of 310 or 315 to skin them!
Everyone's favorite five-minute boss - Onyxia - and a creature known as The Beast in Upper Blackrock Spire.
Now... how did we do it back then? With our teeth?
We had a little help back then... when you downed The Beast - which was a fairly significant thing back in the day - it dropped an item - a dagger - called Finkle's Skinner. Having a look at the item description - it adds +10 to skinning!
Hey... it was a big thing back in the day... it was essentially required in order to skin the hound... and the drop rate at first wasn't 100%... so sometimes you COULD skin The Beast... and sometimes (as luck would have it) you couldn't.
The thing about Finkle's Skinner is that it's the property of Finkle Einhorn... it even says so in the item description.
This little treasure makes an off-hand reference to the movie Ace Venture: Pet Detective... Ace Ventura (played by Jim Carrey, a fellow Canadian) makes the revelation that "Finkle is Einhorn! Einhorn is Finkle!"isted as property of Finkle Einhorn, alluding the revelation in Ace Ventura- "Finkle is Einhorn! Einhorn is Finkle!" in discovering that the character Ray Finkle had assumed the identity of Lois Einhorn - a female detective.
You had to be there...

Next, let's talk about Mojo, baby...
No, no... we're not DIRECTLY referencing Austin Powers (the Mike Meyers series of movies... incidentally, Meyers is another Canadian)... but you might think we were when we're finished...
See... Mojo is a rare blue frog non-combat pet that you can only get from the Zul'Aman instance... and it's not easy.
See... you have to have an Amani Hex Stick (they drop from the trash mobs in Zul'Aman) and THEN you have to use it on a Forest Frog. Sometimes the frog will transform into a chest or into a limited-supply humanoid vendor... but SOMETIMES... if you're LUCKY, you'll get Mojo, baby!
yeah.mp3

The frog will appear in your inventory without any rolling from the raid! Yay!
It gets better... if you /kiss Mojo, he will transform you into a frog for 15 seconds and start whispering sweet nothings in your ear!

I thought you'd never ask!
This won't take long, did it?
I promise not to give you warts...
There's just never enough Mojo to go around...
Your lily pad or mine?
Now that's what I call froggy-style!
Feelin' a little froggy, are ya?
Listen, , I know of a little swamp not too far from here...

Naughty!

oh.mp3

As always... an awesome podcast guys!

Loremaster Blade

Emails

Email #A From Villathalla
Hello guys
Valathilia here
So I hope you all had a great week :)
Well to start off I had too switch guilds due to the my old guild leader disbanded the guild and took all items from the tabs...talk about a jerk LOL oh well I found a great guild that's barely starting to raid so it's kinda great :) btw I am gonna start selling the horde champion pets to the alliance but I am going to use my alliance toon to promote them, can I get in trouble or will it be ok?well thanks for everything and love the podcast
- peace
Vala



Email #1 From Ariisa

Greetings Aprillian, Ashayo, and Glanthur,

Just wanted to drop a quick note to say how much I enjoy the show, and to say "Thank You" for taking the time to bring the goodness of wow to so
many others.

Looking forward to the possibility of the ctrl+alt+wow trio unleashed on BOE :)
(come on boys you can do it too!)

Ariisa, Resto Shaman
For the Alliance!!

Email #2 from makiling

hey guys, this is makiling

real life has been hectic for me, so i had just listened to episode 118 yesterday. all i can say is that i hope you never get tired of reading my letters on your show. and in return i will do my best to provide you with my own stories about wow that i want to share with the community.

a lot has happend in the past few weeks in wow, not all of them happy. my friend who introduced me to wow has decided to cancel his account. he said he had to choose between WoW and WoW minis, because the tournament schedule and raiding times were in conflict and he chose to play WoW minis. our guildies were surprised, and saddend by the loss of our tauren tank and shammy healer. but he was more than that to me and so i comfort myself with the thought that although he may not be with us online, he is only a phone call away from me..

i played with my priest and got her to lv 40 and dualspecced shadow and holy. i must agree that healing instances with healbot makes it quite easy. i must say tho that playing as a healer takes a different mind set. i just hope that there will be enough people that want to run instances in the long grind lv 58.

my main (lvl 80 mage) has also seen a lot of action this week. i got into normal and heroic ulduar pugs and got an upgrade to my belt! however, i felt bad at one point because i rolled for a cloth helm (that turned out to be a healing helm) and won. so if the priest who was in our raid is listening to this, i just want to say that im really sorry. we got to deconstructor in heroic and auriaya in normal. it was really fun and in grateful that the leaders were forgiving enough to let me join. i can finally relate to your ulduar stories in the show, yay!

i also got to lead my first raid pug this week. i wanted to start a heroic OS, so i got a healer and a tank in LFG, ad filled the rest of the spots. it was an interesting experience of getting multiple simultaneous WIM (wow instant messenger) windows pop up in my screen and scrambling to reply and invite people. it gave me an appreciation to what raid leaders in pugs do, and i salute all who do this and pull it off! we got to 21 members and the majority decided to go do it. i got summoned last, and we pulled off OS with 0 drakes =)

those were the highlights of my WoW week.

looking forward to your next show!



MoMoments

Hi,
so sorry I have missed emailing the last 2 episodes but would like to take this email to comment on the last episode, #118.

To what Ashayo stated, about your spells on your action bar are not the up to date spells and ranks, so true!
It happened to me on my priest; he hit 80 and has dual spec holy and shadow.
I wanted to try out Disc spec so I went to the trainer and paid him 20 gold!!! and hated every minute.
So once I respecced and was working on my disc action bars, I noticed the same thing Ashayo noticed: the (I think it is) Prayer of Fortitude, the one where you buff the group with stam/spirit. Well it always needed Sacred Candles and I had 80 of them! Yet on the action bar it was red 0 = I had not reagent.
I hovered over it and it said I needed devout candles!!! WHAT!!! Whats next pumpkin nutmeg pie candle!?! (dont tell anyone I have one of those at work all the time! hey there is nothing wrong with that!) Well to end this long story, I had to fix all of my spells as there were not up dating and I do not know if it has to do with dual spec.
Now I need to check all of my 60+characters, well maybe just the ones I play.

Ok now onto the statement Aprillian made: "Raiding is not for me" and the reasons you mentioned = I AGREE!!!

To me nothing is worse than you see in LFG " LFM for Naxx, link your stats, spec, gear, SSN, DOB, your salary history....."

Well I am the same way, if I cannot get into Naxx or whatever you know I am fine with that too.

Some one asked me and I also heard it on a podcast: if you dont raid what do you do?"

Well believe it or not WoW is more than raiding or even instancing I believe.

Without going into all the details, which Aprillian knows many of the things we all can do besides the precious Raiding,
and as I commented on @brigwyn blog, there is no one right way to play. This will be a long lasting argument,
discussion, whatever you may want to call it.

So Aprillian I am glad you are one of our designated representatives as there will always be more non-raiders than raiders.

Now as you mentioned, if we all can find a nice group, guild, or pair up with our friends than I think it will be a fun experience.

Now I need to get back to work as I am writing this at work.

Thank you again for a great work week in and out to all of you and all of our wonderful hardworking podcasters.

If you can once again plug our good friend Xandarr and his blog: The Experienced Noob (http://theexperiencednoob.blogspot.com/), Thank you.

Take care all till next time
--
Mo

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