Tuesday (8 Mar) - PvP, Darkmoon Cards and Blizzard "Support?"

Tuesday (8 Mar) - PvP, Darkmoon Cards and Blizzard "Support?"

Hunter Fortress was again at it Tuesday night, so check out the details "at the end of this post" or "after the break" as Wowhead is fond of saying. Up first, though, is an update on the trinket Wild is gunning for and JB's attempt to re-situate herself.

Wild has begun working on getting the Darkmoon card trinket called Tsunami (i359, +321 int) to replace an i325 trinket. The lowest price on the AH for that trinket is 19,000 gold, with an average price of 25,000 gold. Wild refuses to pay those kind of prices, no matter that it's best in slot for anything short of raid heroics. Philly is working to be able to make the darkmoon cards, but the cards created are random. Most of the cards won't be the type Wild needs ("waves" cards), which are rarer than the other types. Of course, Wild would need the most expensive set. In the meantime both Happy and Lost have been ordered to check the price of single cards every day in the hopes of catching under-priced cards to help build the set. It takes eight waves cards (one thru eight) to make a set. Wild has five cards now - three thru seven. Of the remaining three, the ace and eight are going to be the hardest to find a bargain price for.

Blizzard Support Surprises

The plan was for JB to transfer from Wild's home account to Philly's account. JB met all the requirements except for two - she still had mail in her box and she was a guild leader. It took only a few minutes to clear her mailbox and to make Happy even happier by making him the Guild Leader.

Three attempts to complete the official sounding "paid character transfer" failed. I supposed that the issue was that system just hadn't caught up with the change in guild leadership. So I waited until Tuesday morning and then tried again. No luck. Early Tuesday afternoon I tried again. Nope, not happening. This time I put in a ticket via email.

A bit later I got the expected "we got your email but I'm just a computer so don't bother answering" message. Then, about an hour after that I got an email from Josh. Josh was a pleasant sort who wanted to help. His "help" consisted of this remark: "I see nothing on my side that would be causing this issue. You should be able to select the character, then realm and account name. I show both accounts as merged so you should be fine in this attempt. If you have further issue, please call in and we can process this over the phone for you." In other words, it's not Blizzard's fault, and his advice was to do again what I had already tried to do five times. Which wasn't working.

He mentioned that I could also call in by phone to get it resolved. Do you know how hard it is to even find the support phone number? They really, really, prefer us to do ANYTHING but actually call them. But I did find the number, and I called. Now, there is no charge for calling, but it's not a toll free number. I have lots of cell phone minutes to burn.

I got the usual automated system, and got the usual broken record music (does every business in the world use the same music to wait by? the kind that sounds like someone stomping on the CD while it's playing?). Anyway, I figured I could get in a heroic while waiting, but to my great surprise the tin can music was replaced by a human voice within the first two minutes. Stephanie listened to my problem and offered to run the character transfer through herself. Of course, it worked for her.

So, the lesson here is that Blizzard is so good at deflecting it's customers to every possible avenue of support EXCEPT a phone call, that call center must be dying of boredom and fighting each other to grab the few callers persistent enough to make it that far.

In the end, JB got her transfer. She'll be joining Wild in MM soon. By the way, Wild ponied up for one more +agi heirloom cloak so that JB could take one with her - that will help JB, EZ, and Shevils. Bean, Rakta, and Chaitee will still have their own to share.

Hunter Fortress Play Time

Beano and Shevils got in some good practice killing mobs and dueling outside Orgrimmar while waiting for the rest of the crew. Life happens, so we weren't too concerned when 9pm passed and it was still just us two. We had plenty to keep us occupied. At 9:30pm we had just decided to go ahead and queue up for WSG when Speak arrived. Speak was still rubbing the sleepy dust out of his eyes, but he was ready to rock. We grouped up and and joined the queue. Beano had taken a fancy to do a little exploring and hunting in the wilds of Durator while Shevils and Speak practiced colorful and vulgar language as we tired to avoid each other's pet's and the dreaded "Kill Command" (KC) spell as we dueled. Shevils had the early advantage as her pet, Poo, seemed to be able to stick to Speak like, well, poo, and Shevils only needed a couple of KC shots to bring down a level 14. Speak pretty much had evened the odds by the time our winded pets had had enough.

Beano, meanwhile, had managed to canvass almost the entire peninsula of Durator and was a little unsure how to get back. Shevils then made the terrible mistake of giving her directions, forgetting the cardinal rule that no Wild family member should EVER give directions - and then made it worse by going off to find her. Well, Beano was surrounded on three sides by mountains with no obvious exit from her predicament. Shevils found her - but Shevils was on the wrong side of the mountain range and couldn't get to her. Shevils started backtracking while Speak casually took the southern road until he could peel off and connect up with Beano. On the way back we all had a little fun with the npc Tednug and his pet Scratchfever, and soon after that we got a WSG.

The WSG battle was a brutal affair. Both sides had some heavy hitters and good healers who shielded as well as healed. Neither side could even penetrate the other's base at first. Speak was finally able to grab the alliance flag and during heavy combat managed to bring it back to our base. However, during the battle the alliance had also taken our flag.

The alliance made several runs at Speak and his flag defenders, which they expertly fended off while Shevils and Beano tried to rally the rest of the team to assault the alliance base. The alliance made no effort to hide their mage flag carrier. The mage, his healer, and other defenders stayed inside the tunnel in their base and taunted us to come get them. We tried. We had position outside the alliance base and could take out most of those coming down from their graveyard (the ones that escaped to assault our own base had to deal with Speak), but it was hard to get the horde players to pull together for the assault into the alliance tunnel. Shevils and Beano, with one or sometimes two others, kept striking into that tunnel trying to get enough firepower on that flag carrier to get him to drop it long enough for Speak to cap his flag. However, that mage had some pretty awesome firepower himself and none of us could stand up to it for very long.

We were down to our last minute and neither side had been able to cap a flag. Finally, Shevils forced the alliance out of the tunnel and into the open. There were other horde players outside and given another thirty seconds I think we would have killed that mage. It was not to be, though, as time expired and the match ended in a draw.

With Speak keeping our flag safe, Shevils ended up leading the horde team in killing blows (17), honorable kills (62), and total damage done (15k+). That alliance mage had 29 KBs against us and the alliance had another player (a hunter) with 21 KBs. Beano was in the middle of the battles the whole time, getting 6 KBs, 55 honorable kills, and was in the top half of the team in damage. Speak had 4 KBs and 43 HKs while sending every alliance player that came at him to the graveyard.

It wasn't a win, but it was a powerful, tightly fought match.

After waiting another thirty minutes without getting a match, Beano called it an evening and we switched over to Sista and Kire for dungeon runs. Three quick dungeons (RFD, DM, and then RFD again), and Sista was already dragging and decided to call it a night, while Kire headed off into the dark depths of another dungeon. Sista made level 46. I'm hoping we start seeing some new dungeons pretty soon. We should be close to getting access to Zul'Farrak and Stratholme, and another run in Scholomance wouldn't be bad, either.