Adventures through Azeroth

This is the ancient Chinese symbol for "heart". Today, in Japan, the character is now "心" (kokoro) also meaning "heart". However, in the day of the samurai, while the modern character was being taught to students in the classroom, the ancient character was still being taught in dojos of the sword...

The strokes go from left to right:

The first stroke of the sword is the biggest of the three. Starting from a standstill, when an opponent is in what is known as "chudon" stance (mid-stance) you begin by circling the tip of your sword around theirs while slowly gaining forward momentum.

Once you've found their center, a quick snap up throws the opponent's sword tip flying off guard, exposing their head. This is the second stroke (the mid-sized stroke in the middle). In practice, one wants to explode forward in perfect synchronization of this stroke.

The third and final stroke is the killing blow and the smallest and most powerful of the three strokes. The final stroke on the far right is a quick, accurate, killing strike to the head. One must be charging at full speed by the time the stroke is executed to obtain full power to kill your opponent.

The symbol also looks like a heart.

How I Joined
(I was holding out to join the platinum circle but oh well)

I've been playing WoW since day one. I started a guild with my two friends Shminka and Vaft, oh and Dezol (sup noobie).

/y TRAIN TO ZONE!!!-~!
/y TRAIN TO ZONE!!!-~!
/y TRAIN TO ZONE!!!-~!

The guild was called <Twinke Star Sprites>,

does every game use '<' and '>' for guild tags?

/omgitdoes EQ ftw

TSS didn't last long... or progress... we had guild drama. After finally achieving the great feat of getting to the dog boss' front door in BRD with 8 people in group (TSS' biggest raid EVER!) TSS dwindled and one day Vaft came online and cut the ugly head off TSS forever.

Shminka and Vaft decided to join Iron Circle. I myself had remembered Ibsen... from a previous encounter. Ibsen was leading PUGs through LBRS to get some key to some shit iono…. Long story short, I thought he was a nub so I didn't join.

/Jabel says: IC? who r these nubs?
/Shminka says: its good. its a mature guild of older members
/Jabel thinks to himself: (fuk this shit)
/Jabel says: aite
/Jabel says: who leads this mofo?
/Shminka says: Ibsen
/Jabel says: r u fuking kidding me? i know that guy

I decided to solo and grind PvP. However, I missed my friends, and Ibsen turned out to be... a nub... but once they brided me with Dal'rends MH I joined.

Now on to the real story...

Once upon a time Warriors sucked. I mean completely a joke. There I was in Darkshire with the crew still low enough level to get red cons from skeletons and standing there before me was Fish with his level35 Warrior only quest sword with a big box on my screen that looked something like this:

Fish challenges you to a duel.

I killed that guy every fucking time. It was embarrassing... a lvl36 war w/ one of the most uber weapons in the game at this point in time and me at level 20somthing, killing this guy over and over again no matter how hard he tried?

He re-rolled a punkass mage and eventually ending up pwning the IF dueling scene. Point of the matter being; Warriors sucked and back then GMs actually cared and listened to their audience (now that talent revisions are all long gone, Blizzard could give a shit). The naked gnome march was established to protest the suckiness of Warriors.

I'm sure representatives from every server showed up that day; it was huge news on the official forums. By mid-day IF was full of naked gnomes.

The server crashed.

From a player driven protest.

Blizzard had no choice.

Warriors were forever changed.

I don’t know what it was, the game was so new, I didn’t even have an alt, I just turned 60. No1 had seen Onyxia, ever, she might not have even been in the game yet, who knows.

But there in Winterspring, in the yeti cave, was Jabel and Sparkles, and the huge rampaging orc Beld, slaying yetis with single strokes of his massively razor sharp harpooned axe.

He had already savagely murdered us both. We had no other option. To kill this orc, We needed a flawless plan.

An even more flawless execution…

Back then there was some talent that would slay a rogue in 2hits. We were cut down like paper. Absolutely no chance of survival; our dots were underpowered – AP didn’t factor in at all, we couldn’t come near scratching one – no1 had a Dal’rends set yet! Puppet, the most uber rog on the server had a Felstriker in MH,Thrash Blade was the sword rogue’s blade of choice. Warriors could charge us, stun us, snare us, dot us, and somehow kill us in two hits, the more we hit them,the more we dodged their blows, the quicker we died. (this insane 99% imbalance was eventually put in check and is now 66%-balanced imho.)

But this is the old days, this is the days before raids, before honor grinds, before loot… for godsake we were in the yeti cave for no other reason than to find trouble. And there it was in the form of Beld.

As I recall, it took us 3 attempts before we finally killed him. After we got it down it really wasn’t a problem to kill him. But that’s not the point. The point is we had fun. Nothing particular to do in WoW other than hunt horde for a few hours looking for one to killl, and then teaming up to take down a seriously overpowered motherfucker.

I want those days back. And /thankyounakedgnome you are the baby jesus of WoW for forcing Blizzard to listen to its players for the first and only time in the history of the game and thank you for overpowering warrior vs. rog forever.

And Beld,

fuk u.