We start Part 2 in August of 2008. Patch 2.4.3, the final Burning Crusade patch, is on the live servers. The Lich King closed Beta test is active. Through a giveaway on WoW Interface for Addon Authors, I was able to get acccess. It's hot outside and the Summer Olympics in Beijing are about to start.
After spending a few days at the New Jersey Shore, my first trip to the ocean actually, I had been away from WoW for a few days. Kinda silly to think about now, but I think at that point, a few days had been the longest I hadn't played since I started in 2006. I remember seeing a WiFi Cafe on the Wildwood Boardwalk and wishing I had a laptop so I could pop on WoW. I missed a raid night or two. Oh, the horror.
August 3, 2008 - With a dead dwarf at my feet, I ascended the throne. The King is dead. Long live the King. Yes, I know that's a female toon. Shuush.
August 8, 2008 - Forged Alliance raids Molten Core!!! Attunement was still needed to use the quick port into Molten Core at this point. So I took my Warlock in with a quick strike team and got a few people attuned while others waited outside with the quest. One by one we summoned people in to collect the quest item. Then they'd leave and join the raid group. Once I ran low on Soul Shards, another warlock came in to do the same. We got a bunch of people attuned that night. Team work!!
August 9, 2008 - Flying Space Goat!!! I've only done this Draenei quest once, regretfully.
August 12, 2008 - It took us a while, but eventually we got a Zul'Aman bear run team going. I don't recall how many people got bears eventually, I think it was upwards of 12 or 13. Those were some of the most fun, well coordinated, precise runs we've probably ever done. Till we got it down, there was little margin for error. And people were seriously dedicated. There was one night where Benvolo's internet went out. He grabbed his laptop, got in his car and drove down to his University and parked on the sidewalk which was within range of the WiFi. From there he finished the raid. All this while they were still pulling.
August 18, 2008 - By this point, we had 2 Karazhan groups running weekly, both on farm. Most regulars brought alts to gear gear, have fun or help new members gear up, etc. Ingame tools to manage raids were non-existent except for an Addon that few people used, so I'd usually make a TXT file with names and message / pester people to put together a raid each week.
August 20, 2008 - While the 2008 Summer Olympics were going on, you could get a special Competitor's Tabard for participating in a Battleground, win or lose. If your side won, you had a chance to receive the Gold Medallion for a special Chinese dragon pet. Sadly they havent' done this again for following Olympics.
August 27, 2008 - This screenshot from the Lich King Beta features dual-wielding two 2-handed weapons! zomg! Seriously, it was a big deal.
August 27, 2008 - Beta screenshot. So Blizzard wanted to get rid of Mount speed increases like the Riding Crop. They had this crazy idea of making them enchants instead that you'd have to apply to each mount you had. Now keep in mind, at this point Mounts and Pets were still always items in your bags. They quickly scrapped this idea and made Mounts and Pets spells instead. The Riding Crops stopped working after you hit level 71 though. It wasn't until much later that they made all mounts' speed based on your riding skill.
August 28, 2008 - Bears. Grouping up for Battle of Mount Hyjal.
August 29, 2008 - Apparently the Orcs decorate their mailboxes with dead, naked draenei named 'Welcometoorg'. K.
September 5, 2008 - Egbert is scared shitless of Teron Gorefiend. I don't blame him.
September 8, 2008 - I think this started off with like two or three people lining up with their mounts, then others just started following suit.
September 8, 2008 - Bears and Netherdrakes! People may badmouth Shattrath City, but at one point this sorta thing happened often. It was a bustling hive of activity. I hope one day we see another joint city like Shattrath and Dalaran.
September 12, 2008 - Sylvanas Windrunner. The Dark Lady. The Banshee Queen. Throughout Classic and Burning Crusade, she had a slightly modified Night Elf model. In the Lich King Beta they gave her a slightly modified Blood Elf model, before scrapping it and making the current model.
September 16, 2008 - Illidan had little tolerance for failure.
September 19, 2008 - Talk Like A Pirate Day finally makes its way into WoW. Arrrrr!!!!!!!
September 20, 2008 - The 2nd Annual Brewfest, now with the bugs worked out.... hic!
September 21, 2008 - Holidays with special bosses on PvP servers often looked like this before the queueing system. Half the fight was making it inside. Unless you had a friend with Direbrew's Remote, which had just been added.
September 29, 2008 - So a group of us from Forged Alliance did Heroic Sethekk Halls this night. To our shock, Reins of the Raven Lord dropped. First time seeing it for most of us. Naturally we all needed on it. Both Ofie and myself were tied for the high roll with 95. However, the game awarded the mount to me. Turns out when two players are tied for the high roll, there's a hidden re-roll between those two players that the game uses to determine the winner. Poor Ofie. It looks better on a Shadow Priest than a Holy Paladin anyways.
October 1, 2008 - We're two weeks away from Patch 3.0 and with it, the removal of a number of quests. This includes the infamous Marshal Reginald Windsor epic quest line. As such I rushed to complete it on all my toons that were capable.
October 4, 2008 - Ah, The Relic's Emanation daily quest. Until the Ogri'lazy addon came about, most bits of paper or used envelopes on my desk had the letters R, G, B and Y written on them. I could usually memorize the first 5 or 6, but not reliably after that. Eventually someone made an addon called Ogri'lazy which gave you a little ingame notepad for recording the pattern.
October 11, 2008 - Farming the Netherwing mines, pro style. Have a Paladin group a bunch of the mobs up and then burn them down. Profit.
October 14, 2008 - Patch 3.0.2 - "Echoes of Doom" was released.
October 17, 2008 - Patch 3.0.2 arrived just a few days before. The first thing most of us did was run around collecting achievements while converting all our mounts and pets into spells to free up bag space. Lots of people were suddenly exploring the world again and completing old dungeons and raids.
October 21, 2008 - At long last the Dalaran shield bubble has faded to reveal... a crater... Because Dalaran flew to Northrend.
October 22, 2008 - Patch 3.0.2, in addition to adding all of the new Lich King systems (but no content yet), also nerfed the difficulty of all Burning Crusade raids. This allowed Forged Alliance to finally push past the bosses that had been holding us back. It was still difficult, but not as much. By the time the Lich King expansion came out, all we had left to clear was Illidan Stormrage himself and the Sunwell Plateau.
October 22, 2008 - Shattrath Chicken is a little known game where you and others fly as high as you can above Shattrath City and then dismount all at the same time. The first person to use slowfall, ice block, etc. loses.
October 22, 2008 - This is the 2nd year of the Headless Horseman boss. Now each player can summon him without resetting the instance. So we'd bring someone would a warlock and just summon and cycle all our alts in until everyone had used up all their toons' summons. This left lots of Headless Horseman corpses strewn about.
October 23, 2008 - Forged Alliance downs Lady Vashj!
October 23, 2008 - The second scourge invasion begins. Beware, for the Lich King is near! Necropolis' began attacking the major cities and random zones in the world with a plague.
October 26, 2008 - Invasion events began popping up around the world. Scourge mobs would drop Necrotic Runes, Haunted Momento and various armor pieces. The Runes could be used for currency to purchase some items.
October 26, 2008 - A Necropolis attacking the Eastern Plaguelands.
October 26, 2008 - Prince Tenris Mirkblood was added as a special boss only available for the two weeks of the Scourge Invasion event. He dropped a Vampiric Batling pet for all players and a very special Arcanite Ripper for one lucky player. Since most players only had two shots per toon at this weapon, they're pretty rare. I still carry mine in my bags to this day, for when I want to bust out a face melter :)
October 26, 2008 - A now-empty grave site for Arthas Menethil's loyal horse, Invincible, was quietly added in the patch.
October 26, 2008 - A better look at Prince Tenris Mirkblood's chamber in Karazhan. This is now an empty room.
October 27, 2008 - The fight against the scourge invasion and their plague began in Shattrath City, which was safe by nature of being on a different planet.
October 27, 2008 - There were various dailies and quests you could do to help the effort against the plague.
October 27, 2008 - The Scourge attack the Tanaris desert. At 5 o'clock in the morning. Don't they ever sleep?
October 27, 2008 - The Necropolis outside Ironforge.
October 30, 2008 - Tabard of the Argent Dawn was one of the special items you could get from collecting the Necrotic Runes. Naturally, I made sure I got one for all 6 of my level 70 toons.
October 31, 2008 - On Hallow's Eve, Forged Alliance finally defeated Archimonde!
November 11, 2008 - Yor is a boss in Heroic Mana Tombs who can only be summoned after completing the instance and using a special item. Pretty cool, but most rarely bothered with him.
November 11, 2008 - The Lich King's Frostwyrms attack Stormwind Harbor. We finally meet King Varian Wrynn, who has returned from a long "vacation". And amnesia.
November 13, 2008 - Wrath of the Lich King release day!!!! I used a personal day and requested off a few days from work to play a bunch. A month or two earlier I had pre-ordered the Collector's Edition from Amazon.com and they kindly gave me a free upgrade to release-date delivery. I must've spent an hour or two watching the "Making of" DVD while installing it and playing through the Death Knight starting zone.
November 13, 2008 - Pretty much all you saw in Stormwind that day was new Death Knights running by, being spit on by the NPCs. Oh and King Wrynn's speech about accepting them into the Alliance.
November 13, 2008 - The first boats to Northrend were loaded down. Talk about an epic fun trip though.
November 13, 2008 - Blizzard's dungeon team did a great job here.
November 15, 2008 - One of the big changes to adjust to was not raiding anymore. I was used to rushing home from work, tossing dinner in the microwave, firing my computer up and eating dinner while waiting for a raid to start 5 or so nights a week. Karazhan Group 2's 16 months of raiding ended just a few nights before release. Now I took my time when I got home, logged in and did quests and dungeons. I even took a break from tanking for a little while, preferring to level up as DPS.
November 16, 2008 - This is still a year before the Looking For Group tool. We still had to hoof it on foot to dungeons. So naturally the entrances tended to be PvP hot spots.
November 20, 2008 - Running into The Lich King while questing was very foreboding and exciting. You never knew when he was going to pop up.
November 21, 2008 - While questing here I stopped to eat (in-game) and get some health back. A Horde mage ran by, sheeped me and then ice lanced me and ran off. I thought it an attack so I ran him down and cut him to pieces. I later learned he was actually helping me regen health by sheeping me and then using Ice Lance rank 1 to break it. And I killed him for his help. Whoops. Wonder whatever happened to that guy. Probably became one of the biggest gankers on the server.
November 22, 2008 - After the Battle of the Wrathgate, you were sent on a long questline to investigate. This included a trip to Orgrimmar with Jaina Proudmoore. It was a long and very entertaining questline. Sadly after the changes in Cataclysm, they removed the later parts of the line and it now ends at the Battle of the Wrathgate.
November 22, 2008 - The new Sylvanas Windrunner model. Glory to the Dark Lady.
November 22, 2008 - At the Wrathgate, both Horde and Alliance forces were attacked. Grand Apothecary Putress led assault on Undercity, forcing the Forsaken and Lady Sylvanas Windrunner to flee to Orgrimmar. Upon hearing of this, King Varian Wrynn decided to launch an attack on Undercity to finally reclaim Lordaeron for the Alliance. At the same time the Horde forces attacked from another side to reclaim the Undercity for the Horde. The forces met after slaying Putress and the demon lord Varimathras and began to fight before Jaina Proudmoore teleported the entire Alliance force away to prevent a war breaking out, squandering resources needed to fight the Lich King.
November 25, 2008 - After about 12 days, I reached max level again.
December 2, 2008 - A rarely visited part of Sholazar Basin.
December 4, 2008 - Crystalsong Forest. The World Design team did not disappoint.
December 5, 2008 - Starting to gear up from heroics, crafting and reputation grinds.
December 6, 2008 - So our first time raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, I had raid lead and I accidentally had forgotten to change the difficulty to 10-man. It was at 25-man. But due to a bug, the first group or groups of trash only had half the health they should have, so we didn't know until we started getting our asses kicked. It was about an hour before anyone realized what happened. After changing it to 10-man, we started making progress.
December 8, 2008 - Our first kill of Sartharion 10-man. Shoutout to Mark (Wadup) as I think this is around his first appearance.
December 10, 2008 - Two dungeons and a raid all shared the same meeting stone. This is the result. :)
December 23, 2008 - It didn't take us too long to clear Naxxramas on 10 man. Having someone with first hand experience (Wadup) helped a lot. Shoutout to Ben (Challah) who I think makes his first appearance here.
December 23, 2008 - Forged Alliance clears Naxxramas 10-man :)
December 28, 2008 - It took us a bit longer to get Malygos down. We did this fight with just one tank. Since Dual Spec wasn't in yet, I had to port back to Stormwind and switch my talents from Protection to Fury each time we did this raid.
December 28, 2008 - Forged Alliance defeats Malygos 10-man.
December 29, 2008 - In Wrath of the Lich King, all raids had both 10 man (called normal) and 25 man (called heroic) versions of raids. After a little while we had enough people to do the 25 man versions as well.
December 31, 2008 - Sometimes I still used the boat to return to Stormwind if not near Dalaran. No auctioneers in Dalaran yet :)
As the year 2008 came to a close, we were on Patch 3.0.3. Forged Alliance was raiding once more and I had just began leveling alts in Northrend.
All of my toons had moved their Hearths to Dalaran since the city had Portals leading to all major cities. It used to be that you didn't get a quest to go to Dalaran until level 74, but mages could teleport there at level 71 - but not open portals till level 80 (I think). There was also a Battleground queueing cheat. A mage got to Dalaran and grouped up with a few of us. Then he queued for a battleground. When the queue came up we all entered and then left the battleground. The system would drop you out at the local of the person who started the queue. Once we got to Dalaran with a Warlock, we started summoning our friends and alts. Oh the shenanigans.
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