Friday, February 17, 2006

WoW Murloc Pet secret code from Blizzcon

Gurky Murloc Pet
It seems the love for the murlocs, especially the infant ones, is expanding among the players of World of Warcraft. In fact, i really am wondering if, somehow, this phenomenon isn't spreading across the "uninitiates" too. It all started with someone noticing the gurgling warcray let forth by any murloc attacking a target; then people began to talk about this, making fun of the standard situation: a player walks close to a murloc base (murlocs have villages, i know), tries to pull one of them, ends up with 10 crying, gurgling, running to fight the poor player =>
player dead. Rinse and repeat, until insanity. The human nature can turn the unpleasant to being harmless by making it the subject of a joke, i think this may be a factor that contributed to the increasig simpathy for the murlocs of any kind (and the baby murloc in patricular, since the babies are always cuter, see the kittens, puppies and human babies too). At some point, even the official Blizzard website had a mouse-over sound making section which - surprise - let you hear the famous murloc battle cry : "Grahralahgrahrahrahrararaw".
As the new tendencies must be exploited, Blizzcon, the international convention for showcasting the upcoming Blizzard titles, offered the opportunity to raise the Wow's murloc population, delighting the attendees by a bag of goodies which contained, among others, a special code for
obtaining a in-game murloc baby. Entering the code by talking to a npc is the only way to aquire such a pet. If you are the lucky owner of such a code, you can either sell it by auctioning it and make a small fortune or you can talk to ( Alliance side :) the dwarf Ransin Donner in Forlorn Cavern in Ironforge standing there with a little murloc named Murky (blue) or the
other dwarf, Garel Redrock, for Gurky (pink) ( Horde side: )Zas'Tysh near a small pond in the Valley of Honor in Orgrimmar for Murky (the blue murloc baby) or Tharl Stonebleeder in the
same location, for Gurky (the pink murloc baby).

The baby murlocs don't have any usage except their presence being a symbol of your belonging to the few special ones (hehe) and being cute and all, gurgling in a smotther and childish way; and oh, they burst into dance sometimes, cane and tophat included.

The murloc babies popularity increases as the time passes, i've seen t-shirts and towels for sale with baby murloc prints, i have recently admired some pictures of a clay murloc baby, created for a child's great joy and not for sale. People express their creativity and start turning the virtual cute, little pets into real copies that can be hugged and loved. I haven't seen yet a plush toy representing a baby murloc, but it wouldn't be a failure to start a business in selling these things, now would it?

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

White Hat vs Black Hat SEO

By definition a blackhat is someone who uses hidden text techniques or cloacking in order to create doorways and rank better. A doorway is a page with stuffed keywords without any meaning for a human reader, but valued by certain search engines.

But how about those who create web pages on domains like
"" and put some copy pasted content from other pages. They create 30 such sites and start submitting them to directories and doing link exchanges. They pretend to be white hat, but are they trully? They have no idea about the subjects in their sites and they don't bring any new content for the Internet. They create those pages with the only purpose of having traffic in order to monetize it. So I consider this last category black hats too.

A true whitehat never creates new pages and domains about subjects he don't have any idea about. He only promotes his existing sites with unique and useful content, not just affiliate links and google adsense on them.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Razorgore Strategy

Razorgore the Untamed is the first boss of the Blackwing Lair, a tough , yet possibly very entertaining encounter.

Is is recommended that you try him and BWL in general only if your guild or raid had passed at least Majordomo in MC, (as BWL is harder than MC ), otherwise it would be just a loss of time and repair money.

Razorgore's location is a room filled with 30 large dragon eggs, much like the ones found in UBRS (Leroooooy!, that's right), just that these ones can be destroyed only with Razorgore's help, and in the following you'll see how.

The fight starts by aggroing the controllers on the west platform, killing them and triggering the spawn of adds (they appear in about 40 seconds after that). Kill Grethok and his adds and remember that and this
stage one it's all about managing the number of the adds and destroying the eggs, as quickly as possible, as there is a risk that the numbers of the mobs should raise to an incontrolable situation.

On the west end of the room there is an Orb, used to mind control Razorgore through stage 1 of the fight; the ideal situation consists of 2 controllers (paladins -bubble and control- for an alliance raid or anything else suitable, but keep in mind that the controllers must survive during this phase, as the use of Razorogore's abilities is crucial for the success of this stage) taking turns in mind controlling Razorgore.

The mind controlling process can begin even before the kill of Grethok and should be targeted on destroying the eggs (95% of the time), the only case in which you won't use this ability is when it is on cooldown. Then you might want to use the "sleep dragonkin" ability, as the fireball volley usually draws too much aggro on Razorgore, which, as you might guess, must stay alive during phase 1.

The adds that i've been mentioning so far are of 3 types: melee (legionnaires), dragonkin and mages. As you prolly expect, the melee ones (first 2 types) are hard hitting, heavy armoured etc. kind of mobs, while
the mages are more fragile but more dangerous too due to their AOE attacks. The easier way is to keep the adds population mainly consisting of melee and the dps group in your raid should nuke the mages asap; of
course, it's not a piece of cake to tank the melee damagers, but it's preferable to being batch killed by the mages. Healers, heal, tankers, tank and dps-ers, do the dps! It's that simple, isn't it? Now, balance is
everything. There's no need to keep the orcs alive with any cost, of course you must decimate them to keep a controllable population, but only if the mages are being taken care of, as killing them is the highest
priority for you. Tip: mind control the orcs and use them to kill the dragonkins, as they have 400% damage bonus against them. If the dragonkin number is too big, use the druids to sleep a part of them, anytime
required (and it is required most of the stage, in fact). Any other classes that can croud control should do so (sleep, sheep, fear, scream), in an organized fashion and if possible by taking turns, in order to keep a
even threat. During stage 1 also try to kite as much as possible, a horde raid could use the shamans' earth binding totems, everybody can use the hunters' traps etc.

By the end, the chaos is spreading and the numbers of the adds raises insanely, but do not panic, as all of them will go away when the last egg is destroyed. In order to make it to this final moment of stage
1,when there's only 3-4 eggs left, use all your CC abilities and chain fear everything, don't focus on killing, but escaping them.

Phase 2: time to kill Razorgore itself.

Razorgore has, beside his melee attack, a hurting fireball volley and a conflagrate attack that gets you out of your control, burning you and the people around you. This is the reason for dps-ing him mainly ranged
and using more than one tank. The MT is facing Razorgore, the backup tanks are behind him. When the unfortunate conflag event happens, the MT also loses aggro, so a backup tank should take his palce immediately, while the burning ex-MT steps back in order to protect the others of catching fire.
As you might have noticed, there's a lot of fire involved, so it's not a bad idea to bring along some fire resistance equipment, but bear in mind that you'll not leave the "in combat" state between the 2 stages of
the fight, so no gear switching is possible.

Try to take advantage of the large size of the room in the unfortunate case a healer should die. have a druid rez him in-combat, but as far away as possible from the action. The ressurected healer will be out of
combat and will be able to bring back some of the other fallen comrades.
However, it's best not to come to this, as the unpredicted can interfear and mess the things up.