I don’t have time to comment on this right NOW, but for my feedreader viewers at work trying to sneak content by your work filters… here is Blizzards’ announcement:

Player Achievements Preview
While Wrath of the Lich King will improve many of World of Warcraft’s existing features, it will also introduce plenty of brand-new ones to keep the game fresh and interesting. One of these new features is sure to suit a wide range of play styles: achievements. These self-contained goals will offer new challenges, satisfy goal-oriented players, allow others to see your accomplishments in World of Warcraft — and are just plain fun.

World of Warcraft’s achievements system will launch with more than 500 individual achievements covering every aspect of gameplay, including world exploration, PvE, PvP, professions, and character development; from the purely whimsical to the truly epic, there will be something for everyone. Some achievements come with in-game rewards such as tabards, vanity pets, and titles. All of these rewards are purely cosmetic and just for fun, but you’ll certainly stand out when you proudly display them.

And don’t fret about running out of achievements anytime soon. The list is easily expandable, so you can expect additional achievements with each new World of Warcraft content update.
The Achievements Window
Upon starting your journey in Wrath of the Lich King, you’ll see a new button on your main action bar. Click that button to bring up the achievements window.

The top of the window displays the total number of points you’ve received for completing achievements. Below, each achievement appears with its name, description, point value, the completion date, and a progress bar (if applicable). Some achievements expand to display a list of individual components, highlighted to show which parts you’ve finished. You can also designate which achievements to track as you play, similar to the existing quest tracker. An important design goal is to provide players with everything they need to know to unlock an achievement.
Feats of Strength represent the past glories of Azeroth, and as such, players will find them very difficult — if not impossible — to earn. They’re worth no points, and unlike normal achievements, unearned Feats are not displayed in the achievements interface. Feats include old-world player-vs.-player ranks, obtaining rare mounts, special titles, and more. Feats of Strength will be awarded retroactively (that is, they’ll be immediately granted to your character if you qualify) since many of them will be impossible to earn in Wrath of the Lich King.

It’s great to be able to see your own achievements — but it’s even better to let the world know what you’ve accomplished. By right-clicking other players and selecting the appropriate option, you can compare your achievements to theirs. Every time you earn a new achievement, your accomplishment is announced to your guild and everyone in your immediate vicinity — and the custom achievement animation and sound effect are unmistakable. Also, your achievements will be viewable on the Armory, allowing you to track and show off your accomplishments via the web.

World of Warcraft’s achievements come in several varieties. Some simply require specific actions to unlock, such as getting a haircut or defeating a member of each race in your opposing faction in PvP. Others involve a progress bar and require you to do something several times — such as give out 10 hugs. Some achievements are progressive; for example, once you complete an achievement to collect 10 vanity pets, you might next be asked to collect 25. Finally, meta achievements unlock when you complete other achievements — unlocking all World Exploration achievements (see below) unlocks a World Explorer meta achievement. Some achievements, including those that involve quests, honorable kills, items currently in your possession, skills (including professions), exploration, and reputations, will be applied to your character retroactively.

To help keep track of all the different achievements you can unlock, you’ll find the following categories in the achievements window:

Player-vs.-Player: This includes arena, battlegrounds, and world player-vs.-player objectives. A few examples: Hot Streak: Win 10 ranked arena matches in a row.
Alterac Valley All-Star: Capture graveyards, towers, and kill the enemy leader all in one game.
City Defender: Kill 50 enemy players in your faction’s capital cities.
Dungeons and Raids: Every end boss of every raid and dungeon in the game grants its own achievement. Future achievements in this category may include ones for completing a run without any player deaths, with fewer than the maximum number of players, or within a certain time limit.
Professions: Advancing to each tier of mastery in a profession earns you an achievement, and there are specific achievements for secondary skills (with major professions to follow).
Quests: Quest-based achievements include completing a certain number of quests and completing specific quest lines. This category contains zone-specific subcategories.
Events: Seasonal events such as the Midsummer Festival, the Lunar Festival, and Hallows’ End have specific achievements of their own.
World Exploration: You’ll earn achievements by exploring each zone in the game — and get meta-achievements when you fully explore a continent.
Reputations: This set of achievements includes attaining exalted reputation with each faction in the game.
General: These achievements tend toward the whimsical, including getting a shave and haircut (a new feature of Wrath of the Lich King), obtaining a certain number of tabards and vanity pets, falling from a great height, and more.

Sidhe Devils has it’s first raid drama, now.

Although my guildmates probably don’t know it yet.

See, for the second week, I’m organizing a scheduled Saturday night Karazhan run. I’d like to make it a regular thing.

And I have a dilemma.

Read the rest of this entry »

Patch 2.4.3 is live!

That means that those wonderful WoW TCG cards with the in game effects can be redeemed.

I have my personal card of The Footsteps of Illidan.

I also have readers who have told me, in comments and in email, that I need a T-Shirt that says “I tank with my FACE!!!”

So then, as Emo Philips might say, I will just juxtapose the two….

Starting now, I am having a friendly little contest.

Send in your original image that you think would go good on a T-Shirt with “I tank with my FACE!!!”

Cassie and I will put them on the Sidhe Devils guild website for the guildies to chat about.

The top ones according to Sidhe Devils informal chat will be displayed here on the front page for your final voting. 

The winner will get MY personal Footsteps of Illidan code card, AND will get a T-Shirt from the Cafepress store with their image on it!

The deadline for submissions will be Friday July 25th… unless I get, like, 2 submissions and then dead silence. I’ll be putting up a link to this page on the sidebar so it doesn’t vanish into the mist…

And I’m not some cold dispassionate observer here. If you’d like to get something in to me but you’re on vacation or really busy right now and you think it’ll take some extra time, email me and let me know… I can extend it a bit. I’d just like to have a firm date set so you know that it’s not just going to go on forever…

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Submission fine print… the only conditions on your image are, first, it should be in a format acceptible to Cafepress for use as a 10″ x 10″ T-Shirt image. Cafepress_sizetemplate_10×10.zip is the template Cafepress provides. 

Second, it should include the phrase “I tank with my FACE!!!”, which is the theme for the contest, after all. 

It’s understood the winning image will be available to be added to the Cafepress store, where I will make approximately two dollars on sales, if past store items are any indication.

In-game images, black and white or color artwork, whatever your imagination comes up with… digital or hand-drawn and scanned… the voting question to decide the final winner will be; ”Which of these images do you feel would be the most fun as a T-Shirt?”

Send your image to; tigerlordgm AT yahoo DOT com, with the subject line FACETANK ART.

At the end of the whole thing, I will figure out how to do a gallery post with thumbnail images linking to the full size pictures, and the names of the talented creators.

So if I only get 1 submission, that is going to be a mighty lonely gallery. But a highly amusing post, so it’s all good.

Good luck!

I was reading a thread promising drama and coming up lacking. Way too polite. Shame on those nice, polite peoples!

And I came across a single sentence that I thought was awesome…

Sometimes, you can be reading boring tripe and just… funny!

Sparten on the Shandris server said;

Chuck Norris had sex with a semi-truck…..THAT’S how we got Optimus Prime.

LOL!

Anybody see any other great one liners as they browse the forums?

I don’t expect any as great as “Officers don’t do officers like you do”, or “I don’t need Hit, I’ve got good Crit”, but I’m sure there are plenty of real gems out there.

Yeah, that’s right.

This is mostly for my peeps whose work prevents them from getting other news sites.

And as usual, here are the items that I think are the most interesting on the patch notes list (which are shown in full on MMO-Champion)…

Equipping an item will now cancel any spell cast currently in progress. Of course, for Druids, this makes macros using Idol swapping a bit more problematic… but more of a heads up, really. And weapon swapping, etc. If you never used this, then no worries, but if you were used to easily swapping items for optimum Idol and Weapon combos with different attack types, then it will require some adjustments.

When a stun wears off, the creature that was stunned will prefer the last target with the highest threat, versus the current target. All this is telling me, is if I was applying proper threat before a Stun, then I should be able to count on the mob coming after me when Stun breaks. Win!

Barkskin: The cost of this spell is now reduced by Tree of Life Form. Barksin cast by trees, and cheaper! Woot!

Magister’s Terrace

• The Stun component to the Sunblade Mage Guard Glaive Throw has been removed and the Bounce range reduced.
• Vexallus and Kael’thas are now tauntable in Heroic mode.
• Vexallus’ damage caused by Pure Energy has been decreased.
• Kael’thas’ Arcane Sphere has had its visual size increased. His Arcane Sphere attack has had its range decreased and the damage/second of Phase two on Normal mode has been decreased. (Heroic mode remains unchanged.)
• Sunblade Warlocks have had their damage reduced slightly.
• Fel Crystals in the Selin Fireheart encounter have had their health reduced slightly.
  Warlord Salaris and Kagani Nightstrike have had their damage output reduced slightly.

Having recently done this a few times, I can safely say… YAY!!!!

And yes, I am glad we did it on normal successfully a few times before the nerf. I’ll take the nerf, but I now know exactly why I am happy with this…

Clockwork Robot Bots fight amongst themselves again…without attacking people in the arena. Well… they’ll blow up other Bots in the arena, but you know what we mean. Well, hell… time to whip out the bots again… for guild meetings. Other than that, I’ll stick to my froggie and my bunny.

Shattered Sun Pendant of Acumen: The triggered effect from this Item can now occur on periodic damage ticks. I guess it’s time for me to grind that SSO rep from revered to exalted on Windburn now.

Time Management features have been implemented! These features include an alarm clock, stopwatch and viewing your computer’s local time.
The new stopwatch feature can be accessed via the /stopwatch, /sw, or /timer slash commands. Inputting a time into the slash command will make the stopwatch count down. For example, /stopwatch 1:0:0 will make the stopwatch count down from an hour, /stopwatch 1:30 will make it count down from 1 minute, 30 seconds and /stopwatch 30 will make it count down from 30 seconds. Who exactly was asking for this?

Nightbane will no longer become unresponsive and unkillable during his air phase. Cool… I understand he is targetable now in the air, too!

Fixed an issue where players could have two minimap tracking types active at the same time. I was hearing that people in the guild were delighted that Mining and Herbing showed up at the same time. No dual farming for you! Denied!

Among other things not in patch notes, the loot cards from the Trading Card Game “The Hunt for Illidan” can now be used. And there is a bear mount in the game for the next expansion of the Trading Card Game that’s not out yet… yeah, I will no longer be spending a dime on The Hunt for Illidan. Screw the Etherial, I’m saving money now so I can buy cards until Windshadow has a bear mount when the next TCG expansion is released.

Have fun!