I'm not sure if this qualifies as a Birthday gift...

...But Ulu got his gear back yesterday.

Well I thought it was kinda cool, even if it did take 25 days to complete. None of the gear was gemmed/enchanted when it was returned, but Blizzard also gave me the Nether Vortices/Primal Nethers that the Gold Sellers bought with my Badges. They've currently been sold to fund my reenchanting/regemming fund.

What is Best In Life?

Still no word on Ulu's gear.

That said he did manage to scrape together enough badges to grab the Inscribed Legplates of the Aldor last night. Pretty nice upgrade over the Wrynns he was using, especially with 2x 15 Stamina gems in them. Ulu is currently sitting at about 15k health in his MT gear. It's not amazing, but it'll be enough to be useful in T5 instances and maybe even trashtank Hyjal.

In other news, I weakened yesterday and pre-ordered Age of Conan. An action-based MMO with Free-For-All PVP doesn't exactly sound like my cup of tea, but hey, it's Conan.

Three days, three different shoulders.

Well three weeks into the hacking mess, still no sign of Ulu's gear. On the plus side, with the exception of his Bracers, I've managed to build a halfway decent set of gear for him now.

On Friday, Ulu came and helped Off-tank a Void Reaver/Solarian run in Tempest Keep. After that was cleared, Ulu went and tanked a couple of Heroics. First up was Magister's Terrace, where Ulu was finally able to get his hands on a Commendation of Kael'thas! After that it was off to Sethekk Halls heroic where Ikiss kindly dropped the Spaulders of Dementia, giving Ulu a set of shoulders with actual tanking stats on them.

After that, Ulu had enough badges to buy a new Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker. However, I decided not to bother replacing any more of my old items and decided to keep saving for the new ones.

The new shoulders lasted him all of about 12 hours before an afternoon Gruul/Magtheridon farm gave him a new set of Justicar Shoulderguards. After that it was off to Karazhan, where Ulu got a new cloak and had enough badges for the new ring. After some humming and hawing, I decided to save badges for the new badge legs instead.

Sunday saw Ulu in Zul'Aman with some bored folks where the first chest provided him with the Pauldrons of Stone Resolve. At the moment, I'm still relying on the Tier 4 shoulders for the most part, but the Za shoulders will be useful for my block set when I get Ulu's gear back. As it stands, I'm just glad to be able to raid and do Heroics with Ulu again.

State of the Blah

Haven't updated here for a few days. There's not really much to say. I'm about two-and-a-half weeks into Ulu not having any gear, and I'm expecting to wait the same again.

Wulf's become my main raiding toon whilst I assemble Ulu a back-up set of gear. Thankfully he's able to do competitive DPS in Mount Hyjal, Zul'Aman and Tempest Keep. I'm currently collecting Badges on him to get a Crossbow of Relentless Strikes. I've currently saved 63, so "only" another 87 to go.

Ulu's been slowly developing some OK tanking gear. I've got some friends running him through Steamvaults once a day to try and get a new Steam-Hinge Chain of Valor and/or Devilshark Cape. Those items, plus the Tier 4 Shoulders which Maulgar will hopefully drop this weekend, should leave him at a level where he can usefully off-tank in raids again.

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.