The Stupidest Thing You’ve Ever Seen On The Auction House

"Stupid."

I gotta haul because I’m running late.

Aside from the absurd, what’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen in the auction house?  I mean besides grey items for 99999g.  I mean reasonably absurd.  Like “this poor deluded soul thinks he’s actually going to sell this” absurd.

I logged into the game a few moments ago to tend to auctions and the like and posted a whole load of items that my death knight had acquired.  Among them was a Jade.  You know — the level pre-BC gem.  We’ve all seen them.  Some moron on Bloodhoof is playing the “let’s inflate the market game” with Jade gems.  We’ve all seen this game played.  Hell, some of us — myself included — have even played the game from time to time.  You inflate the item enough to be affordable and buy-out anybody who seriously undercuts you.  In a sense, you own the market.

See but the problem is… you have to keep it affordable or else you’re going to drive people out of the market.

I can’t help but snicker as I say this, but… every Jade on Bloodhoof this morning was priced in the 25g range.

There are just some people who should not be allowed to play World of Warcraft.

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When WoW Dies: Starting Over

No, I’m not speaking apocalyptically of the end of the game, when Blizzard shuts off the servers for good.  I don’t see any indications of that happening anytime in the near future.  I’m talking about when your copy of the game ceases to function.  One of the truly great things about the Windows and Mac versions of World of Warcraft is that the game is completely self-contained.  There are no “hidden” files or registry entries.  You can just copy the folder and be done.  This is a good thing because it makes backups really easy and makes moving it from computer to computer really easy.  It’s a bad thing because up until the other day, I’d been using the same installation for more than a couple of years.  Eventually something is going to get corrupted or break, and sure enough it did.  I did a Command-Option-Q to quickly get out of the game a couple of days ago and went to get a drink.  When I came back, the game still hadn’t exited.  I executed a “Force Quit” and restarted it, but it wouldn’t restart no matter what I did.  I deleted all the folders that they tell you to delete when you have problems.  It still wouldn’t restart, so I decided to do a complete re-install from scratch.

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Tales From The Dark Side: Death Grip Gone Baaaaaaad.

I admit that my earlier Death Knight comments may have been unfounded.  Since I switched from Frost to Blood spec, I’m really beginning to enjoy my Death Knight a lot more.  I think though that Death Grip has got to be one of my favourite Death Knight abilities no matter what spec you are.  It’s just so frickin’ handy.  Especially for caster fugitives and runners.  I never thought I’d ever see a Death Grip go bad per se, but today I did.  Luckily I wasn’t the person who cast it.

I was on my way to Zangarmarsh.  Amusingly — in hindsight — I never actually got there.  I needed to go through Hellfire Peninsula to pick up the first flight point in Zangarmarsh.  I was about to land in Hellfire when I heard chatter in General about a flagged Horde Death Knight who was “being a knob”.  “Perfect light entertainment for Sunday afternoon”, I thought as I asked where he was and plotted a course in the direction of the Pools of Agonnar.

As I was crossing the fence-line just before the Pools I saw a rogue and a boomkin racing in.  I smirked to myself.  “The more the merrier”, I thought as we spread out and started looking for this Tauren.

I ran my Deathcharger right down the center of the pools and within seconds I saw him on the western side of the pools, standing there scratching his Tauren bits.  When he saw me, he white-knuckled his hearthstone but it was too late.  I death gripped him before he had a chance to click his heels hooves together and say there was no place like home.  By the time we were square dancing in the middle of the pools, the rest of the squad had converged and well… it wasn’t pretty.  Not for the Tauren anyway.  It wasn’t long until he was laying facedown in a pool of green… umm… fel-sewage or whatever that crap is.

We hung around his body for a couple of seconds for the traditional postmortem chin wag.  You know.  The usual.  /point.  /laugh.  etc etc etc.

A couple of our squad took off and this is where the story gets… bizarre.

I think he saw the unholy DK take off and figured if I had my back turned he could make a run for it.  I’m not sure whether his thought was to run to the Horde town or what, but the point is he got up and made a run for the road.

I figured he still had two more HK’s left in him so — naturally — I gave chase.  He hug the left wall heading for the road and just as he rounded the corner to make himself parallel with the road he stopped.  I have no idea why.  Maybe he looked behind him and didn’t see me or maybe he just didn’t think I was motivated enough to chase him that far.  He targetted an ooze that he’d agro’ed first.  (I had him targeted and had target-of-target turned on.)  Then I’m not sure whether “the cat” walked on his keyboard or what happened but… you guessed it… he targeted me and hit death grip.

You’re running… from a guy who kicked your ass less than five minutes ago… and you’re actually getting away and you death grip the guy chasing you.

It was one of those “I wish I had video running” moments.

I think today was the Horde short bus field trip to the Pools of Agonnar.

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The Jenkins Title: The Tactic That Worked For Us

As you can see from my lovely little screenshot, my Death Knight got his “Jenkins” title tonight.  I know I’m not the first.  There have been people parading around Ironforge with the title for quite some time.  But we did the whole thing (from “no UBRS key” to “Jenkins”) in one evening and three trips to the rookery.  We learned from our mistakes, and I will pass what we learned onto you if you’re thinking of trying for the “Jenkins” title.

First of all, take ten people.  Even if you’re level 80’s, you’re gonna need a lot of DPS.  You have to kill fifty whelps in fifteen seconds.  A couple of hunters spamming Volley ain’t gonna cut it.  In fact to do things the way I will suggest, I think it’s best to have two of everything.

Your raid group will consist of ten people.  I suggest the following composition to ensure you can get the achievement easily.  Two tanks, two healers, three to four AoE DPS, and you can fill the other two slots with whoever you can find who wants to go who wants the title.  AoE DPS is the key to this encounter however, and the more you can take, the better you will do.  If you could score six of them with the two healers and two tanks, you’d be golden.

I’ll assume you have the UBRS key.  You will need it to get the Jenkins title.

Enter Blackrock Spire and start clearing.  Once you cross the portal into the instance you’ll want to clear a path to the left towards the left stairway.  Assuming nobody in your party is low enough to be agro bait to the groups on the other side of the room, you can skip those, climb the stairs, turn left, and have the person with the UBRS key open the door.

You have to clear everything from this point on.  All the side rooms and stuff have got to be dead or else the final door will not open.  When you get to the door with the guys channeling the fire elemental, click the altar on the left side of the room to release the warlocks and kill them.  Then click it again to release the fire elemental and kill it.  At this point the door should open and the raid leader should make sure that everybody stops and chills while instructions are being handed out.  If you have trigger happy people at this point it can wipe the encounter and you have to reset and do it all over again.

A Death Knight at this point is perfect.  Any spec will do.  You want to Death Grip the dragonkin out of that room without going close enough to the eggs to make them hatch.  There are two large ones at the doorway and another two inside.  The deepest one of the four will be difficult to reach, but caution cannot be overstressed.  If you start hatching, you’ve gotta shift gears instantly.  If you can’t get the fourth dragonkin, it’s not the end of the world as long as the healers are on their game.

As for the actual killing of the whelps, here’s a basic rundown of how we handled it.  We had two tanks (in our case, two death knights) hatch the whole room at once.  Note — if you’re unfamiliar with this room — that you don’t have to click the eggs to hatch them, just run over them.  I marked myself (playing a third DK) with a star so I was easy to see and told the two hatchers to run over as many eggs as they could and bring them back to the star.  Then when the whole herd was on me, somebody tossed a raid warning to begin AoE DPS.  Because of the time limit, it’s very important that AoE dps be coordinated.  It needs to start all at the same time, and all the whelps need to be on the marker.  It’s also important to tell people that if they do die, don’t release.  As long as you don’t release you’ll still get the achievement.  We didn’t have any shamans in our group but I imagine a shaman or two might be nice additions.  Heroism and a couple of fire elemental totems would really help.

That’s how we did it.  I wish you luck securing your Leeeeeeeeeeeeroy achievement.

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