New badges items

New Badge of Justice reward has been revealed on Wowhead. More badge farming is needed.

Let's compared them with the tier-6 sets:

Balance
Barbed Gloves of the Sage (75 BoJ) VS Thunderheart Handsguards
-2 spell damage, -21 spell crit, +3 spell hit, -2 stamina, same intellect, +3 spirit, -35 armor, same socket. Recommended.

Crystalwind Leggings (100 BoJ) VS Thunderheart Pants
-1 spell damage (or +1 incl. socket bonus), +7 spell crit, -20 spell hit, -3 stamina, -8 intellect, +5 spirit, +13 armor, +1 yellow socket. Highly recommended.

Embrace of Starlight (100 BoJ) VS Thunderheart Vest
-2 spell damage (or -7 incl. socket bonus), +11 spell crit, -17 spell hit, -8 stamina, -2 intellect, -1 spirit, same armor, 1 red vs 1 yellow & 2 blue sockets. Highly recommended, considering the difficulty to get a token.

Fused Nethergon Band (60 BoJ) is a nice upgrade for Ashyen's Gift. For 3 stamina, you get 7 more spell hit rating, 12 spell damage and 19 intellect. Highly recommended.

To be continued.

Patch 2.4: Instance

The breaking news:

- The Sunwell Isle is now available for play. This area includes a new quest hub and 5-player and 25-player instances.
New instances are always exciting. My friend has tried out in the 5-man Magister's Terrace and it wasn't that hard, except for last boss aka Prince Kael'thas.

Other breaking news:

- Free entry to Mount Hyjal and Black Temple.
- Players can fight Lady Vashj and Prince Kael'thas now.
- A new title "Hand of A'dal" will be given to players who have completed the attunement quests for MH and BT.
This is a nerf on the raiding and it will encourage more causal raiding. It will help a lot of SSC/TK guilds to move on to MH and BT. Since majority of WoW subscribers are not hardcore raiders, this will probably keep many players happy and so are Blizzards' accountants.

Now the quests are just for the faction ring and/or the title.

I'm not excited of the above changes but these two are my favorites:

- Added Shattrath Flask of Pure Death and Shattrath Flask of Blinding Light to the reputation flask vendors in Shattrath.
Nice nice nice, but why does it take so long time for the alchemist in Shattrah to discover the recipe of these two flasks?

- Gems obtained through Heroic difficulty instances are no longer Unique-equipped.
This one I love. I no longer need to let the gem take a bag slot and wait for an upgrade to socket it. ^o^

- All 25- player raid bosses that drop set tokens will now drop an additional token!
So instead of 2x Hero, it will drop 3x Hero? I'm just kidding. It would be even better if they set it to drop one of each every time. The randomness of the game sometimes are just too buggy.

- Badges of Justice have been added to all raid bosses who did not previously have them!
Sweet, this can be a good motivation for farm raids. I can't wait for new badges reward items.

- Loot dropped by Doomlord Kazzak and Doomwalker has been changed to Bind on Equip.
I guess these items will be very expensive on AH, if I would be lucky enough to spot them on AH.

- Nether Vortex are no longer Bind on Pickup and can now be purchased from G’eras for 15 Badges of Justice!
- Primal Nether are no longer Bind on Pickup!
15 badges for vortex and 10 badges for nether, this will make it easier to let people get the BoE crafted gear. They only need to find a crafter. Will we see vortexs or nethers on AH? I think so, and I guess Primal Nether will cost around 80g, similar to what crafters are usually charging now. Since Nether Vortex costs 0.5 times more badges than nether, I guess it would be around 120g each.

Public Test Realm for patch 2.4

Last week, I have been trying to copy my character to the public test realm (PTR). However the queue was long and full. Early on a morning, I finally managed to copy my characters to the PTR.

When I have downloaded and installed another patch update, it showed "Invalid Username or Password". I was using the same password for character copy and the password worked on live realm. Here's the explanation from Vaneras.

You may not be able to get onto the PTR if you have changed your password in the last 3 weeks. You can try to use an old password but there's no guarantee this will work.

It seems that I have bad luck. I changed my password few weeks ago and I cannot remember my old password. I change my password regularly in order to increase secruity. And part of the secruity is to protect or destroy any trace of your password. Now I can't login to PTR, because I am too cautious. It is just strange and bad luck. But I guess many other people are having the same problem. >:(

Nevertheless, my friend had his characters copied and been to Magister's Terrace a few times. Oh, I'm jealous but at least I could see it on his computer, or maybe even play his character a bit. ^^

I've moved.

I've moved Aethel through paid character transfer. The move was smoother than I thought.
The whole process took less than an hour, which some friends warned it could take a few days. The approval process was estimated to take an hour but it actually took 5 min.
It raises my awareness as it is so easy and fast one can lose characters if the account was hecked.

I left an RP-PvP realm (Defias Brotherhood) to a PvP realm (Ravencrest).