While being some what bored by gearing alts in all epics, I decided to finale level my shaman.   In the progress of doing so I had been bombarded by someone pretending to be with Blizzard.  Either they are going to shut my account down or they are offering me the next expansion.  The problem with that is I know what a chat with a tech from blizzard looks like, and it does not look like a whisper.    I also know how to look up these sites and see where they are located.

wow-inquiry.net

wow-ctmbeta.net

For that you can go to http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx

From here looking at the network whois I see both of these sites are located in China, not much of a chance of getting these bastards shutdown.  But I can post these sites as well as any others I find as sites to avoid.

Just to be clear do not goto those sites

If you ever have any doubts if  your talking to tech make a screen shot by using PrtScrn button, and open a ticket with support.  You can also goto worldofwarcraft.com and get the number for support.  I highly recommend having an authenticator, and not because of the core hound that comes with it.

For those that have wonder what the heck happen to me, its a bit complicated.

First off I was in the progress of working on new companies while selling two existing companies.  Not a lot of detail I can go into there but I should soon be gainfully unemployed soon.   But this time around I will be able to actually have vacations.  But these two sales were taking up the bulk of my time.  I imagine the first 6 months of this year will consume a lot of my time in making new forms of income.  I am not hurting for any ideas.

Secondly I recently heard that one of my grandmothers was “taking a turn for the worse”.   My cousin told me that my father’s sister heard this from the step daughter of my mother’s brother who both works at a nursing home.   For those that are not aware my mother and father are divorced and neither family is that friendly towards one another.  

Most that know me know that I have been estranged with my family and not talked to them for 15 years, in part because I am not into girls (translation for those that don’t know I am gay).   Not to mention for the greater part physical abuse from my father that I won’t go into detail.  I will state that I forgave him long ago, and towards the end of my trip would learn before my father died he wanted to apologize to me.  Which means a lot to me, and for that I accept his apology.  I hold no grudge against him.

To find out where my grandmother was staying I had contacted the LDS church (Latter Day Saints = Mormons) office in Salt Lake City Utah.   At first no one wanted to help me, at least until I tried to invoke sympathy.  Because even though I had not seen my family in 15 years, my mother prevented me from seeing my grand mother for 20 years.  Long story short she was embittered over me choosing to live with my father over her.   Anyway after being tossed around 5 times I ended up from Salt Lake city to a Manti church where I reached a bishop that told me my grandmother was dead!!!!!!!!!  Though after some pressure he got me the phone number for my grandmother’s neighbor.   Who strangely has more contact with an aunt of mine then I ever had.  She gave me the number for an aunt who told me my grandmother was alive, but had Alzheimer and cancer.  They were not going to operate on her due to the Alzheimer. 

My Aunt whom I have not talked to in a long time (and I probable talked to her more this once on the phone then I had ever talked to her in my whole life).  She had asked if I had found a wife?!?!?!?!?! Apparently my mother did not tell I suffered from being the gay.   I had told her that I had intended to visit my grandmother because I wanted to at least get a chance to say goodbye.  I had missed that chance with my father’s dad.   I had wanted to get a digital picture frame and take pictures as I was making my way up from Arizona to Salt Lake city.  My Aunt had talked me into just bringing flowers and gave me the name of the nursing home my grand mother had been sent to.   Funny thing is she remembered the robot toys that I got as a kid and was not surprised to hear I was working in the internet industry.  I will go in to more detail about the robots in my next post.

After which I had contacted the nursing home my grand mother was staying at, and seemed from all the online reviews to be a top notch place to stay.  The nursing home had told me that my grand mother had not taken a turn for the worse, and a visit would be good for her.   After hearing this I have to say I was happy to find it was not as bad as I had heard second hand from the LDS church and my own family.  The cancer was not life threatening.  While she could not remember names, she was not far gone.

So a week later I was an hour into Utah when received a call from someone asking whom I was.  I thought this had been a one of the hotels I made arrangements with.  I gave her my name Benjamin, and she sounded a bit lose so I told her what my name was before my name change (the name will not be spoken).   I thought maybe the friend that did the hotel arrangements may have put it under the name which I will not mention.   The female voice on the other side screeched “You changed your name!!!!”.  For which I asked who this was.  She stated “I am your mom”.  I assumed she got my cell number from my Aunt.   After a brief conversation she said she would call me back.  For which hours passed by and I received no call.   It then occurred to me that I should ask her for a stuff toy my grandmother had made for me, which my mother kept in her bed room.

I had became estranged with my mother after telling her that I was gay and that I cut all ties off with my father.  She seem to focus on the fact that I was not going to bring grand children in to the world at the time, and at the time I was under the impression that she wanted me to stop calling her as well.  I forget with exact detail what it was she said, but the tone of the conversation was hard to forget.  There is also more to my mother’s alienation of me that has to due with my father, but I am not going to go into that.

While in route to my first hotel the deer seemed out to get me as night fell.  I had 5 near misses.  Which is sort of funny after talking to one of my cousins that love to hunt, stated he never sees deer on the road at night.  Here I am a vegan and not a big fan of guns.

It was not until the next day that I figured out how to find previous calls on my cell phone (out of all technology cell phone are not my favorite).  I had called my mom and found out what she had really wanted me to talk to her about.  Which was not that she had no problem with me being gay (for some reason she insists it’s a choice).  What she wanted was for me to not visit my grand mother.  Stating it was a family decision to keep “the grand children” away from grandma, because her not remembering who I was would make her feel bad”.   The argument made no sense from what I had heard from my aunt and the nursing home.  Both of which had encouraged me to visit my grandmother.  The nursing home made it clear that a visit would be a positive thing.

I made the concession that I would not go if I could get this stuffed toy my grand mother had made, on a sewing machine that was handed down to my grandmother and was foot powered.  My mother tried to claim that I had taken it with me when I had left her.   But this is a item my mother claimed she was going to keep until I was old enough.  This was not an item one forgets about where it went.   Its way past that time for it to be in my possession.  Its not worth a fortune either, but it was made for me.   After this conversation I am at a point I could care less what happens to my mother.  As the only reason she had chosen to contact me was to stop me from visiting my grandmother.

I visited my grandmother despite my mother’s wishes, and it was a short visit as my grand mother was tired when I had arrived.  But as I was leaving and even though she was not able to remember me, or so it seemed.   She started to sing part of the itsy bitsy spider song, which I think was her way of remembering me.  My nick name after all is Spider.   I am really grateful for this short visit, though I hope to make another visit in the near future.

On the way home I went to my last step mother’s house, as my father had passed away sometime ago.  I wanted to see if she would let me have some of my things.  For which she had no problem with that and actually encouraged me to take a gun of mine (the same gun that never shot an animal and I was the only one to fail gun safety in my county with).  While going through my stuff I found two books from the Little House on the Prairie series.  Both of which my mother’s mother gave me, and were inscribed by her on my 8^th and 9^th birthday.  Even though haggard from my bad reading habits they were perhaps the second best thing to receive from my grandmother as these were a series that she loved.

Probable more info then most wanted, but this is the bulk of why I have not been around for the last 30 days.  Never mind that there is new content to dive into from the last patch; I have not stopped playing wow because I was bored and should be back playing to some capacity soon.

I was not exactly sure how I was going to spec Larus, I debated on Holy / Protection. Which in hind sight seemed to be a great way to be griefed whatever spec I had choose. Beside the gear that no one was wanting was pointing towards a ret spec. For Ret I have copied my friend Jekab, someone that dragged Rasbora through Scholomance and Stratholme from 56 – 60. Frankly he was responsible for getting Rasbora revered with the Argent Dawn.

Asides for necklace, rings, 1 trinket, shoulders (currently using a epic tanking piece from TOC), gloves (non-epic plate dps) I think I am set to roll out a dps spec that will make leveling Larus to 85 in the next exp a breeze.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Cenarion+Circle&n=Larus

Let me be blunt, if you buy gold you’re a loser. Now with that said, part of the whole blog experiment is to try and make some money, atleast enough to pay for my WoW habit. But at the same time I want to be ethical about it. I have been trying to with little success to stop the gold sales ad sense from Google. Frankly I am surprised that Google does not give key words to block. But instead they want you to post the domain for every single offending ad that appears on your site. Keep in mind they do not want you to click on the ads, because this is against the terms of service for you to click on the ads for your own site. I would love to bankrupt the bastards, but I don’t want break my agreement with Google. So I can’t tell you to click on their adds.

But here is what I can do, I can provide you a list of the sites that are on my site (or was if this works) and short lists I have found online. If anyone finds more sites to block please fell free to post your findings in this post. I will try my best to update the below list.

http://verdinsblog.com/wow/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/anti-adsense-wow-gold.txt

I started Verdin’s Blog because I wanted to see how some people were able to make a living off of just blogging. Following their model I have now set up a twitter account. Which means even more graphics to work on >.>

You can follow me at:

http://www.twitter.com/verdinsblog

I will update daily with the Cenirion Circle dailies (dungeon, heroic, Dalaran cooking and fishing dailies). Until Rasbora gets all his crocs, I will also advise of if its croc day or not. Which today it is croc day, and Verdin officially has all crocs.

Patch 3.2 is coming, and with it a ton of changes. One of which is good but does not go far enough.

Level 20, Regular riding skill
Level 40, Epic riding Skill
Level 60, Regular flight Skill (which will now have 150 % flight speed)
Level 60 ?, Epic flight Skill
Level 68, Cold weather flying (if you have a level 80 toon to buy a heirloom book, I.e. account bound item)

Frankly I think that regular riding skill should be level 10, and it should be a quest for the skill and the choice of a mount. Later you can buy all 4. Needless to say after getting 70 mounts I am not too happy too find they have reduced the costs of the mounts. I wish Blizzard would issue a rebate every time they drop the cost on something. Sadly I bought my last bank slot before the first exp only for blizzard to release pre exp patch that added another slot to buy while making all additional slots 25 g each.

I stopped leveling Vulpes after reading the PTR.. Because on every toon leveling went far faster when they reached 77. While the cost on regular flight and flying mount have dropped significantly. Its simply easier to get from point a to b when you can fly over obstacles, and even better when you have epic flying. However this means Bankous will not gain as much exp doing a shadow cloth run since I will be able to fly over mobs.

The biggest enemy to WoW is boredom. I can’t tell you how bored at times I have gotten because I had to run from one end of the continent to the other. I had practically given up on leveling Rasbora, if it had not been for friends dragging me through instances I am not sure I would have ever gotten him to 60. Larus was easy until 40 and then suddenly it seemed like I did less dps then I did it level 39. Hell I recently completed Lore Master, and I will never work on that achievement again. Kalimdor was a pain. Maybe it would not have been so bad if I had not piecemealed my way through the continent, when I leveled and then later I worked on five alliance cities. But it took along time to complete quests. If only I was allowed to fly in the original content. Instead of taking practically a day to get the last 100 quests in I would have been done in few hours or less.

Blizzards argument is they would rather work on new content then old. It sounds nice. But they need to work on the old content. I am not saying for the old players. Though people such as Tetrehana, Busidox, and myself would love it. The truth is old content is just as important as new. Keep in mind that this game is a business. Its not like most games where you buy a cartridge or cd/dvd and for the most part the development team rushes off to the next new product. Blizzard depends on subscriptions, and ultimately even though they are one of the biggest if still not the biggest online game, they lose customers due to one reason or another. Which means they have to get new customers too keep up the flow.

It should be no surprise that the first character to get dual spec is Meriones. After all its not exactly easy to get groups when I want to. Though I have to admit I am proable going to be rusty with the spec as I have not really been a tree for raids. Taking up healing always increase the chances of finding a group. A lot of my dps gear can be used for healing. For that matter a lot of the gear is probable better for healing then it is dps.

Balance Spec

Restore Spec

The strange thing is that you lose all of your mana when you change specs. I need too find mod to change gear again.   But I have to figure out what the other specs for my other alts will be.  I am not sure I will get a second spec for Vulpes, but for sure Bankous will only have one spec.  Larus will be a challenge as either ret or prot spec will require alot of gear for either spec.   Alot of the gear does not translate over to the other specs.

Any one that’s been Cenrion Circle long before the first expansion knows about the guild Heaven and Earth. Atleast the bad parts of it, and not much about what caused it to splinter apart and eventually go off to a new server when the Burning Crusades came out. After all they were not well liked, and had lost a lot of members because their guild leader went nuts (thinking everyone was a traitoor). A free transfer to a new server meant a new opportunities. I can’t say that I hold a grudge from the problems I had with them, and hope they gained valued experience with their time on our server on what not to do. Hopefully a lesson learned, after all what is the point of running away from your problems if you repeat them.

One thing that made people hate them was when they placed on a forum that they would bring people on runs if they paid 1000 g or such. Back before BC 1,000 g was a lot of gold, almost like getting 10,000 g. Part of the deal was that you could get a chance at gear if no one wanted it from the guild. Which is a pretty lousy deal, atleast with Burning Crusades and Wraith of the Lich King you could get badges for gear. I remember some thinking that this was going to increase gold buying on our server. This will trigger my friggin Google adwords to bring up the bastards *sigh*. If anyone knows how to keep them off Google adwords I would appreciate a message. It wasn’t long before the post disappeared be it the leader of H and E or Blizzard (most likely Blizzard).

I bring this up because there are guilds now that want to sell achievements in trade for large amounts of gold. Some of which I consider friends. I am little surprised to see that they forgot this. Not to mention I wonder if one of the people to buy this achievement got their virtual gold which was paid with real money. Would the guilds still sell the achievement to that person if they knew they paid for the gold? In the real world property gained by illegal methods is often seized even from those that were not aware that they were some how part of ill-gotten gains. Its not entirely out of the realm of possibility that Blizzard would go that far to prevent what is still a real problem even though there are ample methods to increase your personal stash of gold there are those out there are lazy to actually try to make gold to travel faster, fly, level professions, ect, ect, ect……… I can’t help but wonder how much worse auction house prices will be with the selling of achievements.

In the end World of Warcraft is a game that you pay 12.95 – 15.95 a month for. it’s a time sink and its laughable too use the word serious when it comes to gaming. Often people lose perspective of gaming being for entertaining. When I hear people yelling on vent to call someone out over not using consumables, I can’t help but wonder if there is any thing beyond wow for these people. I know I am not one to talk, but most of my wow time is because I work at home and I am on call 24/7/365 it helps pass the time. I know this is something bizarre for someone that has 3 80′s and 5 + level 70 characters. These days I can’t say I have not thought about taking a long breather from wow. Even though wow is my social life, I am not as glued to my desk as I was after all I have a lap top. Plus my company now has new software which has automated many of the things that I did manually. Not to mention these days many places offer wireless internet. However I still am glued to atleast one monitor.

As I have state before I play a lot more then most because I work at home. When I wake up at 6 am I go straight to my computer to see what is what work wise. Often I get an hour of work done before I even have a chance to think about breakfast or coffee. Then I sneak in some exercise, be it by tread mill or mountain bike. Often I stay up till 1 am. Many of my characters show 100 – 300 plus days played, which is due to me going afk to do work. When things are slow I log into wow too do my transmutes and dailies, and then if I have time ponder on who too level or whom I want to get rep on.

Anyway, as of late I am thinking of taking a long break from wow. So if any of my online friends don’t see me online this is the reason why. Even if I was not working at home I would still be gaming, world of warcraft has been great and in the end saved me a lot of money. I don’t tend to replay games when I win the game, which is the same with fiction I don’t re-read books either. I quickly would beat one game then buy another. If you want reach me outside of the game message me on this post and I will contact you with my aim, yahoo, icq, and msn chat ids. I am not saying I am quitting wow, and I still have a lot of posts too publish from the past. But I have entertained the idea of just getting my characters to 80 and perhaps wait for the next expansion. I can’t say I am a big fan of this expansion.

As I said before the machine has been running on borrowed time, so at this point I am just backing up my email and going too try for a back up that does not involve outlook, and will try start a new session and import my email at a later date. So once again I can post and update my gamming blog. I would use my lap top but its not terrible great for gamming or graphic design. When I had got it I had intended something that I could use to get away from my desk, perhaps listen to music, maybe read a ebook, but for sure not for gamming.

So I plan to post my past blogs in due time as well as update my profiles.

But as of today:

Verdin has found a t7.5 and beyond raid content Group, with the guild The Ancient Ones (TAO) which has cleared all bosses except eye of eternity. I know that they used to be with Guild of Guilds (GOG), but there appears to be bad blood between both groups even though there are members of TAO in GOG chat channel. I am hoping the changes to in patch 3.1 make my dps output better. Currently I am two items from being full epic again. I have been slacking on the last 4 points of inscription. Also I have 56 mounts on Verdin and I am working towards the 100 mark.

Rasbora got to 80 in December. Profession wise my friends are the only reason I have gotten to 440 tailoring and 436 enchanting. Clouds, Axyl, and Bushidox I owe a great gratitude of thanks for the cloth and enchanting mats. The lucky number for me to reach is 445 but that’s another blog entry in itself. Meanwhile I am doing random raids on Ras. Currently I have 77 pets on Rasbora which means I have both the skunk and the deer.

Meriones in January (so far it appears the cast time nerf on wraith was now just a rumor). At this time Meriones is the only to have both main professions at 450 Jewel Crafting and Mining. So far I have gotten a few good raids on Meriones that have resulted in a massive upgrades over the coarse of a few days.

Pandion and Larus are my next planned 80’s.

Pandion was re-enchanted and re-gemmed for an extra 92 agility, added a eternal belt buckle for the extra gem slot and the +112 to bracer enchant is very serious nice plus. At first I had to use Calvin (bear pet) as a tanking pet, because Hobbes (tiger pet) could not hold agro. But it appears the last patch fixed that. So I am back to my usual leveling with Hobbes. Leather working is progressing smoothly Pandion is level 75 and currently 415, I am roughly getting 10 points per level. Not to mention I have more items that are of use between my alts, namely Vulpes.

Larus was also re-gemmed and enchanted. Blacksmithing giving extra gem slots to gloves and bracers. I am still trying to figure out seals and such. I have been dpsing in my healing gear something that would not work for Rasbora or Meriones. But it sure seems to work for holy paladins. The grind has not been too bad. Though I am a little unhappy that I have not been able to solo some of the group quest mobs. Alchemy was a bit of a pain this time around to level.

Meanwhile I also slowly work on Plec and Vulpes.

I have to say his time around I don’t hate Plec (I am sure Adam / Clouds will give me grief for saying that), as the grind with almost full epics has resulted to very little downtime, far less deaths, and way faster killing of mobs. I am not to happy with how I have glyphs on Plec at the moment, but then again I am happy not having to waste time on getting mana and health back after killing one or two mobs.

.

Vulpes is a different story, after all he is my weakest geared 70 + alt, and I think the fact that I don’t have a serious main hand makes killing stuff slower then my other alts. Slower killing mobs means I take more damage, which means down time to get health back either eating or using the excess of nether cloth bandages I had left over. I have a better main handed weapon at 74. Not to mention I have had a lot of good blue boe drops while leveling on various alts. Plus I have a few upgrades I can make on Pandion.

Last but not least is Bankous. The last patch was a good thing for anyone that has a bank alt that is 70 that they don’t want to get to 80 anytime soon that is also a tailor. I have leveled tailoring high enough and switch Bankous to shadow cloth expert and every 4 days Bankous climbs .005 levels on the way to killing mobs to clear the way to the maw to make 2 shadow cloth. In addition I have also got Bankous high enough in alchemy to do eternal transmutes. This time around there will be minimal rep grinding and no raids for Bankous the road to 80 will be a few months before the next exp.

Then there is Pogona, Its no secret that I think the Drani are an ugly race for their males. I had hoped that the new race would be Pandarians. But that was not the case. I could not make Pogona physically appealing so I lost interest quickly. But that could change because of possible new races in other expansions and the new feature to change the race and look of your characters. Not to mention I may end up with a lot of useless badges because it appears t8 and t.85 will have different badges then t7 and t7.5. Which seems dumb and a great way to get people to stop doing heroics. But with my badges I could buy artifacts that could make the grind on Pogona even easier. The possibility to change Pogona to a more favorable race is very appealing. Not to mention gear that would level with him to 80 also a plus. But then again that means 7000 gold in riding skill. Good thing I am making any future alts gathers. I know that you are laughing at this Adam.

Since late November I have been pestered by friends to get Rasbora to 80, I ended up taking a side path of leveling Meriones to 77 so I could do the Jewel craft dailies more efficiently. Doing such I returned to getting Rasbora to 80. However its my intention to get Meriones to 80 before they nerf the casting speed on wraith. Sunday I finale managed to get Rasbora to 80.

It was no where near as easy as leveling Rasbora as it was Meriones and Verdin. But I have to say I would hate to imagine what the fight would have been like without a dps set. Not once did I roll against a dps caster even if they were elemental shammy or moonkin. But I ended up having +170 to hit. My crit was around 25% , and spell power was 1012 when I started the solo grind at 70. Not enough haste to brag about. Gear wise I was almost the same stats as Meriones or Verdin. This was from only going for the gear that no one else wanted. And what turned into a fruitless quest to get t4 gloves. Which is funny as I probable did Karazhan on Rasbora more then any other character. Yet I have t4 gloves on every other class I have taken to Karazhan.

I often see people that roll a holy priest that whine about grinding on their own, which I guess is great if you want to hang out in the look for group channel to heal every group and instance that comes along. Or part of some big guild that does not mind helping you level every step of the way. But with blizzard changing how +healing to spell power you now have to roll against people on gear that would better suit you then a dps caster. Haste seems best for a healer. Plus hit is useless to healers. Since agro and threat have been changed crit seems a stat that is ok for either healers or casters. Never mind most casters have no idea what is good gear. Like this lock I saw the other day wearing what I thought was a cool looking robe, was a nothing more then a frost resist gear robe.

It appears holy priests need about 1500 spell power for raiding. I currently have 1569 but I would feel happier if I had 2k. I also think I need atleast 15 k health one instance I found difficult was halls of lighting last boss. A single mistake and I get one shotted. I am not looking forwards to the second boss in the plague area of Naxx. I have had problems with lag on Verdin on this boss. But I have close to 20 k health buffed. Not to mention I can siphon life off the boss while wandering around (as well as other instant cast dots).

So now its time for Naxx and a ton of heroics.