WTB American GMs - Redux

Reading over at Honorshammer's blog about his hacking. His account was hacked and his gear lost on the 21st of April, one week after Ulu. His gear was back with him on the 23rd. Two days later.

Only difference is he was on a US server rather than an EU one.

Bloody colonials!

Still no gear, two weeks in. The CM's have thrown me some more empty platitudes on the official forum, but it's not like they, or anyone else I can contact can actually do anything to help me.

Was supposed to be going to ZA tonight, but the other Pally tank can't make it and Ulu's still not geared enough for it. Guess I'll do dailies and try to gather the mats for a new Belt of the Guardian.

The hacked report, day 10.

Still no word on Ulu's gear, although there was a rather stock reply to my thread in the GM forums.

I threw most of the cash I'd accumulated on Wulf via dailies at Ulu last night, and I dove around various rep quartermasters getting the bits and pieces for a semi-decent tanking set. Special mention here goes to Kirini, Cd's other Tankadin who gave me most of the materials for a new set of Goggles.

After that it was off to Kara with some Cders to hoover up some loot. Ulu managed to get two sets of new gloves and new leggings. He would have got new boots as well, but the chess event was bugged. Hopefully that'll get sorted soon.

I'm Not Gonna Take It!

Kuba's suggestion that I post in the GM forums was a futile gesture (the matter is currently out of the GM's hands), but it did indicate one thing: there are people who have it way worse than Ulu right now. Some poor sods on there have been waiting 6 weeks or more to get their items reimbursed.

I've decided to be resonably pro-active. I'm going to assemble a collection of gear from a mixture of the PVP items the hackers hadn't managed to shard before I noticed them, some rep items, some bind-on-equip items from the auction house and a couple of engineering items. This is roughly what I'm aiming for. It's not brilliant, but it'll let Ulu play Offtank in farm raids and do some of the easier heroics. Hopefully in this way he can at least continue to accumulate badges and help CD with their tanking shortage.

Furhermore..

Still no news on the account. In answer to Kuba's question, I doubt posting on the forums after a week will get anything done faster. I've read that forum and I've seen people waiting five weeks for their stuff back. Still, I've made a thread and we'll see what happens.

A World without Ulushnar.

Well it's been a week now without Ulushnar. Still no word from the GMs about if/when I'll see his gear again.

Wulfsblood is currently halfway to Revered with the Shattered Sun Offensive via Dailies and has accumulated something in the region of 600 Gold doing so. Tried a Survival build over the weekend for raiding, and the DPS was nice, but I've specced him back to his normal Beastmastery build for Arenas and Solo-grinding.

Ulushnar is currently hanging around the Aldor Bank in Shattrah naked save for his guild tabard. I log him in occasionally to disenchant items Wulf has collected, do enchants for friends and hope beyond all logic that his stuff will magically appear back in his mailbox.

To relieve my boredom, I've created a new toon, a Pink-haired Gnome Fire Mage called Shadowdark (a joke on the fact that about 60% of all the player names I see are Shadow-this or Dark-that). She's currently at level 12 and I'm enjoying myself with her. I transplanted her from the Gnome/Dwarf starting area to the Draenei one, because:

a) The quests are better, and
b) The more rep I get with the Exodar, the easier I'll find it to get an Elekk Mount. And frankly, who wouldn't wanna be a tiny Gnome on the back of a War Elephant?

In my absence from Raiding, it appears CD managed another first kill, this time Al'ar in Tempest Keep. Good going guys!

Well, it's day five, no sign of the missing gold/gear and no word from the GMs.

I did some dailies with Wulfsblood last night and this morning, so he has gold enough now to afford to go raiding. I've signed him up for tonight's SSC, but I sadly had to miss last night's "three bosses in one sitting" Mount Hyjal run. Seems Ulu's replacement is doing a better job than he was.

Back (kinda)

So after a complete reinstall and downloading about a gig worth of patch through Blizzard's slow-assed downloader, I just logged in to find... Ulu's still gearless.

Looks like my optimism was misplaced. Ah well, at least I can do PVP, dailies and the occasional raid with Wulfsblood. No tanking news for the forseeable though.

In other news...

Congrats to Chaotic Divinity. Last night they managed to take down Mount Hyjal boss #3, Kaz'Rogal for the first time. Special congratulations to Kirini who stepped up and played AoE tank in Ulu's absence.

Update on the Hacking

Recieved an email from Blizz this morning which said this, amongst other stuff:

Greetings,

We have unlocked your account, and issued you a new computer generated password.

We are still investigating your account for possible vandalism.
Once we have completed our investigation, we will contact you with the results.

As the Game Master team is unable to assist you further until the investigation is complete, please do not send in any tickets on this matter until you receive email confirmation that the investigation has been concluded.

I can't check it out since I'm halfway through downloading the patches after doing a complete reformat/reinstall. Worst case scenario is I don't have my Gear back. No problem, Wulf still has raid-level gear on and I can use the time to grind his SSO rep.

WTB American GMs.

First of all, I wanna thank folks for their supportive remarks. There's nothing scarier in WoW than logging in and seeing your semi-naked main character staring back at you. We all hear stories about the "guy who got hacked" but we never think it's gonna be us.

As for the delay factor, all I can say is you Yanks have it good! Most of my mates on my server have been telling me it's a 2-3 week wait to get your stuff back. I think there's been a deluge of them over here.

The most annoying thing is not being able to access my account at all. Wulfsblood at least has the clothes on his back (hooray he wasn't an enchanter like Ulu) and I could be spending my enforced break from MTing working on his SSO rep or doing PVP. As it stands, I guess I'll go work on mastering Medium and Hard mode in Guitar Hero III.

The End?

So, I could tell you about the raids I was on this weekend or the nice purples I acquired (another two pieces of Tier 5), but it doesn't seem to matter now.

My account was hacked last night. All of Ulu's gear has been sold or sharded, along with most of Wulf's. It's probably gonna be a couple of weeks until I get them back, if at all.

If I don't get them back, then I'm damned if I'm sinking another three years into this game, so this may be goodbye.

On Exaltation

So halfway through a deathly annoying Magister's Terrace heroic run last night, Ulushnar hit Exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive.

Even though the Commendation of Kael'thas refused to drop again, I was able to pick up the Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve and the Sunward Crest from the SSO Quartermaster after the run was done.

The Shattered Sun pendant is pretty similar to the badge reward Brooch of Deftness I was looking at. I lose about 3 Expertise and 9 Hit Rating, but gain a chance to gain 100 Dodge Rating (about an extra 5% chance to Dodge). It's going in my Bosstanking set and I'm looking forward to testing it out.

The Sunward Crest is a direct upgrade over my Dragonheart Flameshield as a threat/back-up shield for Mount Hyjal.

Adventures in Retribution

Ok, so over the weekend, I wanted to do another speed run around Karazhan. Sadly Kirini (the Tankadin alt of one of our best healers) had already arranged to do a Kara run on Saturday night. Not wanting to diulte the pool of useful players further, I offerred to try one of the Retribution-based offtank specs I'd heard about over on MainTankadin. I'd never really tried Retribution before and I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

I ended up going with a serviceable 5/13/43 spec. Not amazing, but it got the job done. the first thing I noticed was that my Health had dropped from about 15.7k to around 14k in my Maintanking gear.

Just after I specced this way someone asked in the CD channel for a tank for Black Morass, and I figured this was as good a chance to test out my build.

We dealt with BM much like a regular tank would. A Warlock was assigned to handle the adds since my AoE aggro was weaker (no Holy Shield or Blessing of Sanctuary). That said, once I'd got three stacks of Vengence up (+15% damage), my threat generation was impressive, and my consecrate was enough to keep mobs glued to me.

Into Karazhan, and I spent a lot of time in DPS mode. I'm sorry to say that my DPS was less than impressive, even with 3k Attack Power and Windfury Totem, I was only putting out ~600 DPS, compared to the other DPSers putting out 800-1000 DPS.

Playing Offtank was manageable where required (Moroes, Skeletal Ushers, Romulo and Julianne, and Netherspite), in fact with Vengence stacked fully, I was often outagrroing the main tank. I was mainly tanking with my normal Spelldamage Mace and Seal of Righteousness, but I really should have tried using my Sun Eater and Seal of Command to see how they compared/

The downside to this is survivability. No Holy Shield effectively curtailed me from tanking any Boss mob and the loss of 1.8k health and Ardent Defender made me squishier for the Healers I'm sure. Still, OTing as Ret didn't suck.

I stayed Ret for my dailies on Sunday Morning, and I found the experience variable. More mana efficent and faster killing than Prot, but I found myself more limited in terms of the amount of mobs I could handle. Just wasn't as fun as AoE tanking.

Compared to a Fury Warrior, Retribution Paladins are almost a mirror image. Fury Warriors have better inherant Survivability but weaker threat generation. Retribution Paladins on the other hand have off-the-scale threat generation combined with poorer inherant survivability.

Still all in all, Retribution's decent enough. I'm not about to have any great epiphanies or give up the niche I've carved for myself in CD for the "joys" of Ret. Still for content I outgear, I might give it a bit more of a chance.

Adventures in 2-Handed-ry

So I petitioned the GMs on Friday night and lo and behold, my trusty Hammer of the Naaru was restored to me on Saturday morning. Along with the aforementioned Reputation Vendor Retribution Epics, a set of boots from Kael'Thas, and a chest from Zul'Amam and a couple of nice rings from Rep Vendors, I was able to build Ulushnar a semi-decent physical DPS set. The only problem is it didn't help with my soloing that much.

Ok, I was able to deal more damage for less mana with Retribution gear, but I was taking more damage, so my downtime was basically unaltered. To be truly effective, Retribution gear needs a spec to match, with all the crit bonuses, Seal of Command and Crusader Strike.

So in the end I reneged and went back to soloing in my Spelldamage gear. Then last night, a crafter in my guild mentioned he'd just got the recipe for the Hammer of Righteous Might. A quick visit to the AH and the bugging of several CD alchemists saw me with the Primal Mights for it, and it was sitting in Ulu's mailbox this morning.

Initial impressions are pretty nice. It gives my Seal of Righteousness a healthy boost, and it synergises nicely with my existing gear. I'm hoping to enhance this in the near future by picking up the Gladiator's Aegis PVP set when the Sunwell Armory opens.