Thanks for stopping by here!

In 1995 I started my first website and the University of Armed Forces in Germany in Hamburg and always liked to design them – that did not mean that I was realyl good at it 😉

About 10-15 years back I have read a nice book about the historical background of merlin and thus used the name myrddin from then on in all RPG’s I played, especially in MMORPG’s. It has been almost 10 years now that I have this domain active.
During the last years I have more or less used the website simply as a design project without much content. There were no updates and I did not check at the website for weeks and months.

My good old guild vanquish used wordpress to publish news of our progress in World of Warcraft and I thought it was a fantastic idea. Often I find snippets of interesting information and do not have the link handy, when I am asked for it. Sometimes I just have a nice picture that I want to share with others or want to have some information easy and fast accessible. So I started this site not as a real blog, just more as a nes system and online collection of bookmarks and snippets of information.
While there were no more than 3 visitors daily in August, those numbers have improved decent and especially the ratio of returning visitors is increasing steadily. This basically shows me that I am on the right path and I just wanted to say thanks!

The Name Slant, btw is taken from a novel of Lawrence Watt-Evans and is the name of the mainchar in his book „The Cyborg and the sorcerors“. The cyborg code-named “Slant“ was sent out as an Independent Reconaissance Unit during an interstellar war between Earth and its colonies, to discover if the colonies were still loyal to earth. Slant was controlled by his spaceship who would kill him and cause major damage to the planet as the slightest sign of disloyalty. This was probably the best book of scifi meets fantasy I have ever read and I started to use „Slant“ for my fighting characters.

Burning Crusade: Beta Forums opened.

Blizzard opened the Beta Forum for all to read, but only testers may write new posts. After a quick overview the classforums are still pretty empty, but give first hand comments from the players.

Burning Crusade: Arena System Summary

Thanks to Terrantal for pointing at this thread about the Arena Sytem. Its a nice summary of blue posts with more blue information in the thread.

Since I like numbers the most I here is a blue post from one of the pages at the end of the thread:

To clarify with an example:

– Let’s say you’re on three teams (one of each format).
– Let’s say that at the end of the week, each of the teams you’re on ends at a 1500 rating.
– Assume that you were an active player on each team (played in at least 30% of the team’s battles)

Results at the end of the week:
– Each active player on the 5v5 team would be eligible to gain 408 arena points
– Each active player on the 3v3 team would be eligible to gain 244 arena points
– Each active player on the 2v2 team would be eligible to gain 163 arena points

So, you’d gain 408 points that week.

Note: in the example I provided above the 1500 refers to the team’s rating. The number of points an active player gets from a team is derived from the rating value plotted on a logistic curve.

Also, one of the points I was trying to illustrate above is that active players on that 5v5 team will gain 408 points each. This is the case regardless of whether there are 10 total active players on that team (the max possible), or merely 5 active players (the practical min).

We don’t want to „split“ points among active players, as that would encourage you to not have alternates on the team, and we don’t want to pressure you to minmax the system by always having the min number of players for a team.

I think this will give you an impression how long you need grind until you get your points needed for the better rewards.

Sword of a Thousand Truths

If you remember the Southpark Episode with the Sword they needed to defeat the player. It has apparently an appearance in Burning Crusade. Fake or not here is the Screenshot:

Sword of a Thousand Truths

Burning Crusade: Pieces of Information from Closed Beta

The Burning Crusade closed beta has started and it also started without NDA. I doubt it would have worked anyhow to keep the NDA up, but this way its much more legal to publish new content.

Well here are some snippets without any guarantees:

Fast flying mounts will cost 5000G – if that will decrease the amount of farming bots?

The pricing may not be final but that is the current price shown in the beta (for the epic flying mount riding skill). Keep in mind that from 60 to 70 you’re going to be getting a lot more gold, so the price won’t actually reflect what it may take to build that amount in the current game.“Drysc

An informative description of the new starting areas.

Dual wielding shamans can buff each weapon.

Arena Teams can be named.

Some more beta screenshots can be found here.

Thanks Borked!

Thanks guys for a very nice Naxxramas clear. For the second day of this weeks Naxxramas reset we had only Gothik, 4 Horsemen, Loatheb, Saphhiron and Kel’Thuzad left. After getting the 4 Horsemen down and another Seal of the Damned, we killed Loatheb, Sapphiron, Kel’Thuzad at one go.

Finally we got our first Kingsfall which is anothe big improvement for the raid’s dps. We got Kingsfall, Gressil – Dawn of Ruin and the Hungering Cold. Its about time we get some phats for our casters.

All in all I am a bit dissappointed in the maces perfomance on Loatheb. I was way down on the damage meter, but I missed 2 Spore buffs. On the other bosses it was not so bad, especiallly in the Kel’Thuzad encounter I did decently compared to the other Rogues also not directly on Kel’Thuzad.

Often I do not get battleshout, Hunter aura and am still lacking 150 attack power to catch up to the other Rogues. This is a difference of roughly 500 Attack Power alltogether. Well we will see the next weeks, how it will turn out.

Thanks for a nice Naxxramas farming this week.

Slant

Burning Crusade: Rogue Feedback

Ommra has posted some interesting Information in the World of Warcraft Forum concerning Rogues. You can read the article here.

It is about redesign of Rogue Talents, effects of increase stamina and crit damage reduction and certain skills and talents. Finally we got information on thrown weapons.

„The mechanic of thrown weapons is being changed in the expansion to be similar to a normal weapon. Once a stack is used it will remain in your inventory and can then be repaired to refill the stack, similar to repairing broken armor or weapons. This allows us to put stats on thrown weapons and itemize them as we would any other weapon.“Â

Burning Crusade: more information on Outdoor and Arena PvP

A post on curse-gaming.com forum shows many details on the PvP System in the coming World of Warcraft Expansion Burning Crusade. Read all details here.

The Author of the Post lists Outdoor PvP Objectives for Hellfire Peninsula („when all three locations are held by one side, everyone in the zone and inside the respective instances gain a buff that increases the reputation you gain while killing mobs„), Zangamar Marsh, („the difference between the marsh’s objectives is whichever side controls both towers not only gain a 5% damage buff, but also take control of the graveyard located between the two towers„) and Nagrand („first, players in the zone on the faction that control the city gain a buff that increases damage done by 5%. Second, there is a pair of NPCs that you can exchange tokens gained by killing people, and dust you gain by slaying mobs in the zone„).

Apparently the raid on the city has been well designed:

Assaulting this city has been so well designed that even if you don’t like Player vs. Player combat, this is something that people will be flocking to. At the mainland end of each rope bridge, there are wyvern posts that you can construct if the other faction controls the city. These wyvern posts when activated place 10 fire bombs in your inventory and mount you on a wyvern that is automatically flown above and around the city like a flight path. These fire bombs can be used and targeting like grenades. They each do 1000 points of fire damage, and place a DoT on the target that burns for 1% of their hit points per second. Now, this may not seem that useful against players, because 1% of even a 10,000 hit point tank is only 100 hp per second. The guards on this island have over 200,000 hit points, so well placed bombs and coordinated strikes can take down this city quickly. After every guard is dead, it is a rush to the center of the town where a flag is located. If every guard is killed they do not respawn so the assaulting team will not have to worry about fighting npcs at this point. The flag is controlled like the PvP objectives in the other zones, standing near it with more people than the other faction will start to shift control to your side. After filling the bar on the ui element for your faction, guards and npcs will respawn and your faction takes control of the city.

He also posted more Information on the Arena System:

The Arena is one of the biggest changes that have been announced thus far. Grab a handful of your friends and queue up for a skirmish (practice), or sign up a 2, 3 or 5man team for a 3 month season/ladder. Each roster can hold double the amount of people required for the arena, 5v5 teams can hold 10 people. Everyone who plays at least 30% of rated games for the team split the weekly arena points that the team earns.

So far only two arenas are open, Blades Edge Arena and Nagrand Arena. Nagrand is a simple layout with 4 pillars at each corner of the open terrain. The developers realized how bland a simple area like this would be, so they added tornadoes that circle the edge of the arena, throwing and damaging whoever comes in contact with it. The Blade’s Edge Arena on the other hand is a lot more complex, containing a bridge and pillars you can jump on top from the center of the bridge. Movement in this arena is key, for there are lots of areas which break line of sight and require melee to jump to reach casters.

Thanks for all the Information.

Make Love not Warcraft!

Southpark, World of Warcraft Episode

The Southpark World of Warcraft episode is availlable to see here. I did not have the chance to watch it, yet and will update once I have seen it. There also used the ingame engine as video.

Burning Crusade: Arena System

I have found an interesting article (here) that takes a closer look at the Arena System that will be introduced in Burning Crusade.

Its apparently based on the „ELO Chess system“ and the author tries to elaborate what this means.