World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is Live!

Last Updated on Tuesday, 18 November 2014 02:43 Written by HalonaZAT Thursday, 13 November 2014 12:01

Warlords of Draenor!

“World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor” is Live!

Blizzard’s fifth expansion for World of Warcraft, subtitled “Warlords of Draenor,” has gone live and players are now logging in to discover another 10 levels of content. This time round the action leaves behind the East-Asian themes of Pandaria to return to the planet of Draenor that players last visited in the first expansion “The Burning Crusade” but with a twist.

In ‘TBC’ the action took place after the planet had shattered apart. In ‘WoD’ players go back in time to a pre-shattering era. Draenor is still whole and the stabilty of the world’s politics is threatened by a bunch of angry orcs. Same old, same old right?

There’s a lot of changes to the basic game – stats have been ‘squished’ to bring all numbers into a more manageable range, abilities have been pruned to remove or combine things that no longer felt essential and several new items have been introduced.

One of the ‘biggest ticket’ items for many players is the ‘Garrison’ which is a step towards the idea of player housing. It’s essentially a phased town whose state belongs to the player depending upon how much time they’ve invested into the expansion. It can be customised to suit the player’s preferences and ambitions with respect to levelling and gearing and thus acts as an evolution of the Tiller’s farm from the Mists expansion before it.

It’s located in Draenor though so won’t likely be a long term settlement for the player but nevertheless it will help Blizzard prove the concept until such time as they feel ready to build the type of player housing that memorialises a player’s personal in-game history from Classic WoW through to current day, illustrating their top achievments from dungeons and raiding through to PVP and world events.

There’s also login queues to contend with. On the most populous servers of which Halona’s home realm of Silvermoon is one, login queues at the peak times on weekday evenings and weekends is in excess of 90 minutes and is often much longer.

For a subscription based service, it’s a real shame that Blizzard hasn’t developed some form of elastic server capability into their infrastructure so they can cope with pretty much any level of demand. It’s not a new problem after all.

Fingers crossed they manage to improve matters before the holiday season arrives. In any event, it’s gaming’s silly season and with over 10 great games releasing in the next two months, our team certainly won’t have any shortage of alternative things to enjoy.

Game on Halonans, game on!

First Kill of Garrosh Hellscream (10n)!

Last Updated on Wednesday, 20 November 2013 02:28 Written by HalonaZAT Sunday, 17 November 2013 11:30

Halona is an Alliance PVE raiding guild on the Silvermoon-EU realm. They regularly recount their newest ‘First Boss Kills’ or ‘FBKs’ through posts like these. Read on to find out which encounter has just been defeated…

FBK - Siege of Orgrimmar - Garrosh Hellscream - 10n

After extending the raid-ID on the Wednesday and practicing for the entire evening, Sunday’s raid began in good spirits, confident that a kill was in the cards. With minor roster alterations from the previous raid, a few practice attempts were required to bed everyone in and then it got serious. Attempts progressed further into the fight until it was just a matter of solving the final last phase burn cycle without wiping.

In short time, the kill was achieved and with the additional honour of a handy achievement for ‘throwing 18+ Orcs under the bus’ so-to-speak. This kill unlocks the heroic mode which will add some interest to proceedings but Halona have now completed the full content of this expansion with no new raids on the cards until the next expansion. Well done everybody and a tip-of-the-hat to all who have been involved in our efforts to date.

First Kill of Spoils of Pandaria (10n)!

Last Updated on Sunday, 20 October 2013 12:32 Written by HalonaZAT Monday, 30 September 2013 11:30

Halona is an Alliance PVE raiding guild on the Silvermoon-EU realm. They regularly recount their newest ‘First Boss Kills’ or ‘FBKs’ through posts like these. Read on to find out which encounter has just been defeated…

FBK - Siege of Orgrimmar - Spoils of Pandaria - 10n

The Spoils of Pandaria became the Spoils of Halona tonight, this night, no other night than this. Word.

First Kill of Malkorok (10n)!

Last Updated on Saturday, 28 September 2013 08:46 Written by HalonaZAT Monday, 23 September 2013 11:30

Halona is an Alliance PVE raiding guild on the Silvermoon-EU realm. They regularly recount their newest ‘First Boss Kills’ or ‘FBKs’ through posts like these. Read on to find out which encounter has just been defeated…

FBK - Siege of Orgrimmar - Malkorok - 10n

Was there ever an encounter more malicious for melee than the one presented by Malkorak? Maybe… maybe not. Regardless, the odious Orc was summoned forth and issued with the old Halona cease-and-desist notice as part of the team’s salute to the second week in ‘Siege’. Soon enough a great reversal will occur and we’ll all be ‘Groundhogging’ our way through these parts once more. For today though, that’s nine bosses from fourteen downed within two weeks marking this as perhaps the easiest raid instance WoW has yet released.

Given Blizzard’s normal expansion cadence of once every two years presents something of a concern. Will raiders be expected to run SoO from now until the autumn of 2014 when we could realistically expect the next expansion? That’s going to be hard to do. Heroic modes of these bosses may be a complete step-up in difficulty but that won’t make motivation stronger. We’ve already seen the bosses die. We’ve seen the content. Achieving a kill in a harder mode never has the same return on investment as that first success. So what lies ahead? At the moment, only Blizzard knows.

First Kill of General Nazgrim (10n)!

Last Updated on Saturday, 28 September 2013 08:42 Written by HalonaZAT Monday, 23 September 2013 10:30

Halona is an Alliance PVE raiding guild on the Silvermoon-EU realm. They regularly recount their newest ‘First Boss Kills’ or ‘FBKs’ through posts like these. Read on to find out which encounter has just been defeated…

FBK - Siege of Orgrimmar - General Nazgrim - 10n

Nefarious Nazgrim stepped up to give Sertorius a piece of his mind and got smacked in the teeth for his trouble. Sucking in air and extending his sibilants, the General gave a ‘ssssspirited’ defense to little avail. ‘Ser-tee-us’ led the smack-down charge and where resistance existed, surrender appeared. Face front, say ‘cheeeeeesssssse’ and ‘ssssssmiiiiilllleeeee!’