I shit you not, for the past 6 months I have been doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft. It is truly amazing how much precious time (and money) this game sucks out of you. Anyway, I have managed to get my first character Hellwrath the human rogue to a respectable level 60, he is currently ready to take on the forces of the Burning Legion in Hellfire Peninsula, but is badly undergeared, much to my fault of course as I had a huge phobia of running dungeons after multiple bad experiences, I hope for this situation to change as I acquire heirloom gear for him after collecting enough emblems on my Death Knight, which brings us quite nicely onto Hellwrathius, a level 80 human Death Knight and currently my main.


Hellwrathius has been a great success, after a brief stint in the Eastern Plaguelands I quickly made my way to Outland with the intent of levelling as fast as I could. Like his predecessor however, this levelling was done almost exclusively through questing, not that I regret questing, my DK was much more suited to the strange and dangerous encounters that lay ahead in Outland and was considerably better geared for it than my leather-clad rogue would ever be. It was while I was questing on my Death Knight that I was first recruited by the Knights of England guild where I remain to this day, in fact they're such a nice bunch I now have four additional characters in the same guild! After a long grind in Outland I was eventually ready to hit the icy shores of Northrend, after level 75 I began to aim for level 80 and managed to complete a level per day, truly a heroic effort, especially since I was levelling up purely through questing like my rogue. I eventually made that all-important ding in a mine in the Storm Peaks, level 80 was the goal I had been aiming for since my Death Knight turned agaisnt the Lich King 20-odd levels previous and I had done it. Although once you do hit level 80 you soon realise that the hard work isn't over, oh no... it only just begins! My main priority for Hellwrathius now is to keep collecting emblems of triumph and frost and eventually get him equipped with the (level 245?) basic Death Knight teir 10 gear, that would be cool, but I have to admit that gear has been a side issue for some time as I have been doing nothing but mining and selling anything I could to afford the ultimate status symbol in World of Warcraft - the Mekgineer's chopper.


I can vividly remember back to the days of being a level 15 rogue wandering the streets of Stormwind being in absolute awe as I laid my eyes on the Mek Chopper for the first time, I could not possibly imagine at that time that I'd actually get one, but I had my mind set on becoming a level 80 death knight with a motorcycle. It would not happen for months, but my perseverance would eventually pay off back where it all started in Stormwind City. Nagrand's economy is in deflation and this proved to be much to my advantage in acquiring the chopper, just weeks ago the bike was going for approximately 20,000 gold each (buyout) on the auction house, but now people can't even sell them for 15,000. And so, with a mere 14,500 gold in my possession (almost exclusively acquired through mining thorium and saronite) I politely whispered one of the sellers asking if he'd be willing to settle at 14k. Totally expecting an abusive or negative reply I waited. And then I got a response... Xeomin was willing to sell me his Mekgineer's Chopper for just 14,000 gold, I was very excited, but of course nothing ever is straightforward with me as Xeomin explained he was about to start a run on Icecrown Citadel and would oversee the transaction afterwards. It was the longest wait of my life, pacing up and down the auction house floor - 'what if he just logs off?' I thought to myself 'what if he forgets?', an even worse thought popped into my head - 'what if someone else snags the bike?!'. Much to my relief the posted auction had expired, why was that good? Well it meant no one else could make a bid on the bike, thus securing my claim on it! I've never traded 14,000 gold before, I was half-worried the seller would somehow exploit the trade system and flee with my gold and bike, although this didn't happen and the seller, Xeomin turned out to be a thoroughly nice bloke. He explained to me he hoped to recoup enough gold to buy himself a chopper one day, he also asked if I could give him a ride to Goldshire, I of course obliged, in fact I think it should be a WoW tradition, if you buy a Mek Chopper off somebody, you should give the seller (or builder) a ride to anywhere of their choice!


My third major character is called Hellwrathar and is a human Mage. I once created a Blood Elf Mage called Alderley on my home server of Nagrand, but found it hard going as I had no higher level character to leech money from, I created him because I had not played a caster before. In addition to lack of funds I had trouble getting started with my professions (I first tried inscription and enchanting, then settled on tailoring and enchanting), and so I mothballed him and remains dormant (taking up a valuable slot) in my character list. I did however try again, this time making a human Mage and I have to say, after playing for 22 levels I can honestly say I absolutely love him, yes he can only wear cloth and yield a puny dagger or wooden staff, but that's beside the point, mages can do some awesome damage with their frost, fire and arcane spells including powerful AoE (area of effect) casts and perhaps the most attractive ability of being a mage is being able to cast portals to various cities in Azeroth, providing a possible extra source of income, particularly from the much-requested portals to the floating mage city of Dalaran.


To see a full list of all my World of Warcraft characters (those above level 10 at least), please visit my Wowhead profile page.

Sat here writhing in agony with my neck and back, but anyway, it's been a while, been really busy... well not really. This evening I was playing BF2 and was having usual lag problems and for some reason, I decided to try it in single player in very high res, 1280x1024 in fact, I was surprised to see the game run quite well and looked great, so I had a thought, maybe my recent problems with BF2 aren't necessarily hardware related... sooo I launched the server browser and found a low ping Karkand server - Super Infantry Clan, the game loaded no problem and to my utter amazement the game was running... not just running, but was running better than I have ever had it running, great hitreg, nice graphics (bear in mind from the screenshot below I hadn't turned anti-aliasing on). Click the image below for the original screenshot (JPEG 147KB).


In other news, my application for a Flex Builder 3 licence was accepted, thank you Adobe! Also, I may very possibly be joining EAF... Speaking of BF2, I'm just 4000 points away from ranking up to Sergeant Major! Soon I will have crossed the 30k gap, and after that, just 10k points later is my butter bar (2nd lieutenant)! Codeined up now to the eyeballs, I'll leave you with the news that I am considering changes to HWDN, including making a nice new design and adding a BF2 leaderboard module to the main page. Oh yeah - I'm getting rid of AdSense for HWDN, it's just not economically viable and it screws up my HTML validity!

Started work on HWDN today, cleaning up layout, reverted to XHTML 1.0 Strict, adding new pages, adding custom error pages, making a header image and navigation and generally improving the site. Thought about reusing the old HWDUDN (Hellwrath.ubersource.net) layout from 2007, although probably won't. Oh yeah, ads have returned, courtesy of Google, I have decided on having one large graphical ad at the bottom of each page and am pretty sure it doesn't spoil the site too much, I'm hoping the ads will bring in at least a few pence that can go towards funding my hosting for HWDN and my other sites.

Hey guys, it's been a while since my last entry, I know, I would like to say I've been extremely busy, but that would be a lie, in fact I've been fantastically lazy, although I woke up before at around 12 and thought I should get to work on HWDN. I have been neglecting the site, and I need to pay it more attention, as you can see I've made some adjustments already, I'm hoping to actually make it look quite nice by the end of it, I just need to stick with it and try and juggle my time between this and my other projects and sites.

On the todo list is a navigation, comments for blog entries, links page, admin pages to add/edit/delete blogs and some BF2 related stats with a leaderboard of the BF2 players I know and love from EAF, uKm and beyond, so watch this space! I've just had some cereal, it's 2:53 and I'm considering going back to bed, I''ve not had much sleep lately and my sleep pattern has been all wrong. Oh yeah, it's Friday which means beer and BF2 tonight, so expect some drunken rantings later on, but for now goodnight!