Vrykuls are funny. They scream “I need your heart!” so fiercely and so out of the blue that it makes this one piece of their battle cries sounds almost peaceful, as a part of their daily routine.

Like if the seven feet tall ripped guy with excessive facial hair and the outfit of a heavy metal band singer came into the grocery store to pick up some ingredients for the home made sausages. So he picked up whole intestines to stuff and the red meat, liver and spices for the sausage content, and already got in line to check all these things out but suddenly remembered his Vrykul girlfriend—a seven feet tall, badly combed valkyrie with the anger management issues and some prominent facial hair on her upper lip—ordered him to buy a heart for the sausages.

Damn dead caw's heart, he totally forget about it! Passing by the right aisle, he got the liver and red meat, but paid no attention to the heart lying on the same shelf of the freezer. “I need your heart!”—screams the Vrykul guy and rushes into the backside of the store where the freezers with the meat and liver are.

But than the Patch 3.3.1 came with its wonderful cross-server LFG feature allowing anyone to participate in dungeons runs without any troubles. You can be out in the wild questing or farming while waiting in line for the next instance run. And there the way the bug is revealing itself.

If you were mounted in the moment you’ve been teleported into dungeon, and your pet was alive when you were teleported out of the dungeon back, you will find yourself mounted and your pet will be just right next to you. Not really annoying bug but a great feature for self portrait screenshots. Unfortunately, it won’t work with the flying mounts – only ground ones. You can see me exploiting this bug in the pic for this post about running WoW on nVidia Ion.

Also, if you are holy priest and you’ve died in the dungeon and turned into angel form, when you teleport out of dungeon you will be pretty alive with full health and mana.

Fortunately, I have Lenovo S12 Ion based netbook to test WoW as thoroughly as I want. BTW, I’ve found out that the lowering resolution down from the native 1280*800 doesn’t really helps so all tests were taken on a native 1280*800 screen resolution. It’s enough for anything and looks really great. But the special effects settings better to turn down to the minimum.

My Lenovo S12 is built on the Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz CPU and had just 1Gb of RAM when I brought it home. So the first series of test I’ve made on a 1Gb RAM configuration:

• Vanilla WoW – Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms and pre-lvl-60 dungeons – all these places are smooth and easy with the FPS jumping between 30 and 50 with up to maximum 60 in the deserted areas and down to 20 occasionally in the crowded areas of Azerothian capital cities.
• Outland and Northrend zones are pretty much ok with FPS from 25 to 40.
• 5-men lvl80 heroics put some load on nVidia Ion – FPS are floating between 15-25.
• And the last but not least – Dalaran – it won’t be your destination of choice on nVidia Ion machine with just 1Gb RAM – FPS are between 7 and 14. Way too laggy.

Adding 2Gb more RAM (for a total 3Gb) increases performance dramatically. You can expect 5-10 FPS increase depending on how much action is in scene. A little 5 FPS performance gain will make lvl 80 heroics playable even if you are warrior tank or paladin healer. Even in Dalaran, while FPS count is going not higher than 10-20 FPS, you will notice a huge improvement in overall smoothness when running around between daily quest givers and vendors.

With a 3Gb setup World of Warcraft performance on nVidia Ion based Lenovo S12 netbook could be described like “absolutely playable and enjoyable most of the time”:

• Almost anywhere in the Vanilla WoW content – 30-60 FPS (around 40 average).
• Outland and Northrend – 30-40 FPS.
• Lvl80 heroic dungeons – 20-30 FPS.
• Dalaran – 10-20 FPS.

If you are curious about how much nVidia Ion notebook could cost, check these links:

• Lenovo S12
• HP mini 311
• ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1201N

I was hunting for this uber parrot since Patch 3.1 hit the servers. It means, since April 2009 – more than half a year! I almost lost any hopes, but suddenly, as it always happens, during the routine circling above the Sholazar Basin, I finally spotted it.

So, Aotona is my most hard to find pet by now. And now the hunt for Skoll begins…

…because Gondria was so easy target for me. I just came to Zul’Drak and tamed her.

Green proto-drake certainly not the rarest flying mount in game, and may be not the most beautiful one. But I got one yesterday and I love him a lot.

Despite its 2% chance to hatch from the Oracle’s mysterious egg, it took just seven or nine (I can’t recall for sure) tries for me. Apparently this blood elf hunter Runningclam is a lucky guy. He’s the one who got Hyacinth Macaw (if you know what I’m talking about) last year.

And no, I’m just a casual player. I have a life, a job and a girlfriend sometimes. And a very little bit of vanity.

And yes, it took me a month to get this ubercatmount.

Got him! This morning at 6:43 CET. Just a few seconds after he has spawned at the “auxiliary” spawn point south of the Dorian’s Outpost.

So, I got the Ambassador title after completing the respective achievement at the level 58. Not a lot of questing, just bought and donated a loads of runecloth – it wasn’t too hard.

It’s a long journey for the level 10 Blood Elf so I have encountered a couple of the other great cases of WoW naming on my way:

Guild names could be fun.

Finally, I have entered Mulgore, tamed my new pet, a common Mulgore’s wolf, and gave him the name:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oIb8NWQIGo&hl=en&fs=1]

The other (moderate settings, no new shadows):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYR8iC0odMU&hl=en&fs=1]

New MacBooks with Nvidia 9400M rocks. very good (for integrated graphics) 30-50 FPS in the first case and excellent 50-65 FPS in the second – it’s just the same performance my Windows Vista laptop with dedicated Nvidia 9600GT 256Mb shows.