Purple Haze

A week of craziness, and it’s only Wednesday!

“I just wish my wand would auto-shoot, instead of me having to push it
each time”.  That was from our mage before the first General pull on
Monday night.  That was the culmination of a bit of ribbing he’s been
taking from us, and it was very funny when we all said “it does
auto-shoot” at the same time.

I had to miss the start and a good chunk of the 10 man run on Monday
night due to some storms that were rolling into the area.  When those
petered out, they asked me to come in so the tree replacement they had
was starting to fall asleep.  It was a good time, we downed Mimiron
for a second time, and this time with considerably less failure.  We
made progress on General trash, and actually pulled the General a few
times.  We got some nice trash epic drops on the leadup to the boss.
We got cloth shoulders that both the mage and our holy priest rolled
on, and our priest won.  Then, 2 minutes later, we got the shoulders
again and the mage passed on them - thinking they were a helm… Dork! 
He was able to pick them up though, after everyone passed on them.
We also got a tanking neck epic a couple minutes after that.  Good
times!

While I was waiting for the storms to start up Monday night, I leveled
my priesty some.  I’m making some progress there, she’s level 39 now.
My immediate goal is to hit 45 so that I can get dragged through BRD,
LBRS, and UBRS.  I’ll probably do 58-60 in Outlands and hopefully have
enough green, blue, and purple gear to get me through our Retro
Raiding of old content.  A guild name was decided on, Years Behind,
with a very appropriate Hogger mascot.  Allegedly, we’re going to even
have forums - for now we are monopolizing the Argent Dawn WoW forums.
Tonight is the first night of our next 10 man lock out period.  I
can’t wait, seriously, for the Raid ID lockout extension feature of
the upcoming patch.  We would have totally extended it to give us time
to work on the General tonight.  Soon, very soon.  There was also some
talk about when the patch hits and we do extend our lockout that we
will do 3 nights (Wed, Mon, Wed) of Ulduar and the last night (Mon)
would be breaking into the new raid dungeons.  It seems hard for me to
believe that we are ready for more raid dungeons but I guess it’s been
3 months or so since Ulduar was introduced.

I’m really trying to focus on my healing rotation, and seeing where I
can tweak things.  I currently do not have a tier set bonus so I’m
trying to keep an eye on my lifebloom usage.  So many times it ends up
being completely an overheal.  I’m also considering trying out a
Healing Touch spec, because I can’t believe that I have this totally
worthless spell that Blizzard has given us.  Naïve, eh?  I’m also
toying around with the idea of trying out Vuhdo, the UI that is
sweeping the nation.

The funny bit from our mage that I mentioned at the top made me think
of some other major changes that WoW has gone through.  From having to click a new destination at each flight master, to the time when the boats freaked out and kept dropping people through the world – and they were replaced temporarily by “boat masters”.  When the boats came back, everyone missed the instant portals of the boat masters hehe.  Running through Stranglethorn Vale and getting dismounted at each bridge, and when you had to be in a capital city if you wanted to troll the LFG channel.  It wasn’t global, and it was before the LFG system.  Ahhh the good old days haha :)

* Lil Edit: that’s what I get for posting from a different computer.  Also, I was in a pain-med haze when I finished typing up the post so apologies for rambling :D

I don’t like Mondays

There’s really not much to like about them, they start my work-week, they require that I am productive after 2 days of being unproductive. 

My brain usually doesn’t function all that well on Mondays, so here is a decent size brain dump from the WoW part of me.

Goals

With fall and winter approaching, there will be more time spent indoors so it’s more tempting to spend it all in WoW. I’m trying to come up with a list of goals for myself in game, so I can be productive while I’m in game and not feel like I have to play every second of every day. I know it seems early to think about winter, but in Wisconsin we have Fall for about a week and then have Winter for about 5 months. That is pretty much right around the corner. We usually have very cold nights/days in October, with September being on the mostly coldish side. My not so complete list of goals, so far and in no particular order, is:

• Finish Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor
• Finish Loremaster of Northrend/Wrath
• Laugh with my friends about how I’ll never finish Loremaster of Outlands/Burning Crusade
• Participate and enjoy the Retro Raids with my 60 Priest
• Oh yeah, get my priest to 60
• Finish the Hodir rep grind on Ysinnia
• Hit 10,000 gold on my bank alt (she’s at 6,500 now, the most I’ve ever had)
• Purchase the cold flying tome once the patch hits for my Hunter so I can fly around Northrend and level her mining
• Help a random new low level character get bags, potions, gear
• Attain the Seeker Achievement

Prepping for the Retro Raid

I was questing in Stranglethorn Vale over the weekend, trying to level my priest for the upcoming retro raids on Argent Dawn. I bumped into another drenai priest questing in the same area and asked if they wanted to team up. He had taken mostly holy talents, whereas I am heading up the Shadow tree. I found myself comparing my mana usage to his as we worked on quests and killed pretty much everything that was in our way. I was using a lot more mana, though I’ve always been the OMG KILL IT QUICK type. I’m finding as a shadow priest, I really need to relax a bit and let the dots work. It also helps if you, at level 34, visit your trainer both at 32 and 34. <sheepish look>

I’m almost 38 now, and absolutely giddy at the thought of picking up shadowform at 40. I’ve had to impose on a few friends to run me through some instances for xp and gear, and it looks like I’ll have to continue to do that. I wish that this priest was on a 2^nd account, well and that first I had a 2^nd account, and that I could power level her myself. Many of the people in the retro raid guild have offered help though. It’s strange, wearing a different guild tag than House Stalwart, and with the actual blessing of my guild leader. Guild chat was considerably more quiet over the weekend, being a much smaller guild and there was really only me and maybe one other person on at a time. I have other chat channels but none are as chatty as Stalwart guild chat.

Waxing nostalgic

During a recent trip through BRD, I was reminded of the time way back in Classic WoW days when 5 of us attempted BRD - at level - with 3 hunters and 2 rogues. “Our pets will tank” the hunters so confidently reassured us rogues. Most of the run is lost to the wasteland of my brain, but I distinctly remember NOT doing the ring of law and none of us had the key yet so we headed across the crowded balcony … when the crowd turned on us. Feign, feign, vanish, vanish, feign. We barely dared to breathe. “Now what?” <twitch> None of us moved, until finally we couldn’t figure any other way out of it.

We laughed the entire way back from the graveyard about that one.

I had played my rogue to 60 when, because of some issues with WoW and my network card, I stopped playing. I played other games, and no games, during my 6 month break and when I returned to WoW I rejoined my friends and family to start kicking it around in some dungeons. I met up with them at Scholomance and I was the second to arrive. So sitting there, acting all cute cuz I’m a female gnome, my friend (who was raiding MC at the time) says “your gear is shit”. Man, talk about getting kicked down a few (thousand) notches. “We will fix that”, he says. So everyone gets there and we head in. I managed to die several thousand times, and picked up a dagger off the gargoyle boss. I died no fewer than 5 times. I think I was stunned by the amazing display of “huntering” by my friend who said my gear was shit. He solod the green cloud room, as well as the zombie room. He could have solo’d the whole freaking dungeon, honestly.

I thought to myself, I want that. I want to be able to do THAT.  I was never able to do that at 60 in Scholo on either my rogue or my hunter, but damn if I can’t tear shit up as a Boomkin :D  I was playing with a friend of mine and looked at her gear.  My first thought was “your gear is shit” but I held my tongue.  Instead, I took her on a shopping trip to the Auction House.  There are players that play the game to have fun, and there are players who play the game to be competitive.  She plays to have fun.  She makes “pew” noises when she is in combat.  I play to be competitive.  I love the Achievements and doing various silly things in game, but in the end, I like having the gear and being able to destroy things when I want to.

People you play with, and people you have to play with

I think it’s hilarious when I’m watching one of my chat channels and I have a hard time following what is going on - only to later realize it’s because I have one of the people on /ignore. There are 2 folks that I honestly do not like that raid on the 25 man that I occasionally back up heal for, and they are constantly blabbing in one channel or another. I find them both to be huge know-it-alls and I hate that trait more than anything. Get this, one of these royal asses actually gets on our vent during our 10 man runs and makes suggestions for strategies if we are having problems. You know, cuz he’s not actually IN THE RAID or IN THE INSTANCE so he’s really helpful. And he only talks to the “officers” of the raid, on a separate keybind so I see his light on on my overlay but can’t hear anything. I think it is so insanely disrespectful, everything he does. I have him on ignore, and now on mute on vent so I never have to hear him again.

The other person that I just don’t like just acts like he knows everything. Or thinks he does. He always has an opinion, or a comment. And if he doesn’t personally know, then he says “well in my wife’s raid…”. Thankfully, I don’t actually have to listen to him because he is also muted on vent and on ignore. The funny thing is he used to not be this annoying. Both of these guys were in the raid group that I was in during classic WoW, doing BWL and such. Only the first was an asshole knowitall back then, the 2^nd one has just developed into an asshole. He was “my warrior” that I would pull to, as a Hunter. We kept the same warrior/tank assignments for pulls throughout the raid and from week to week. So we would frequently chat about stuff while waiting for the other 38 people to be ready. This one was tricky though, because he is a part-time healer and if I had him muted or on ignore, it might affect what was going on. Luckily, our healing officer knows that most of us think this guy is an asshole so we all mute him and our officer knows that we just listen to her for guidance, assignments, etc.

Ya know, there are just some people that I just immediately like. They are funny, generally helpful to other people, can theorycraft but don’t drone on endlessly about it, they can bullshit on vent but can stop on a dime when it’s time to concentrate on the job at hand. By the same token, there are people that I just can’t stand to be around. It’s not that they are as bad as the 2 know-it-alls, they just rub me the wrong way. Granted, I can be high maintenance and kind of a pain in the ass at times myself, but it’s hard when the people I can’t stand are friends with people that I like. I think I need to either stop playing games in the “massively multiplayer” genre, or just tolerate more people.

Embracing change

Icecrown

Toying around with the Eastern Kingdom and Kalimdor Loremaster feats has made me realize that my big goal has to include me getting allllll the Loremaster achievements giving me one big fat Loremaster achievement with title and tabard.  I’ve been trying to deny this.

I open my achievements panel and flip to Quests. I averted my eyes from the glaring hole that is Burning Crusade quests and looked over the Wrath section – the only one not completed is… Icecrown. 3/140. Three. I may as well, everyone bitches about this zone so I may as well just get it over with as quickly as possible. Hmmm I’m now just Friendly with the Knights of the Ebon Blade, I’ll run and grab the tabard quick. Or not. Since the tabard vendor is phased. SKHLGIKHGLHKSDJLFJlkjgflkjghlkghlghkljsflkjfjphasing.

Fine. Argent Vanguard it is. I head to camp and there’s a handful of quests. I work on those, fly clear across the zone, fly back, oh wait, fly back there again. I can’t imagine doing this without epic flying. I find myself flying so much that in order to keep it interesting, I indulge in some druid fun - playing chicken with the ground. Fly as hiiiiiiiigh as I dare, then drop flight form and fall…fall.. and fall until I can’t take it anymore and pop flight form again just before squishing on the ground. Ahh I love being a druid. God help me if I ever play another class with flight.

Hm, these Shadow Vault quests are kinda fun. Hmm you want me to duel some combatants!? YES I WILL! Keeping in mind that I keep about 18 useless quests that are somewhere between accepting and completing, I really only have about 7 spaces for active quests. Being this high maintenance is tiring sometimes. Burn banners! Yes, I can do that. Whee! I’m catching things on fire, I’m sticking banners in corpses… and before I know it, I’ve burned 2 hours and am sitting at 40/140 quests. I also made about 900g in that time. I AM LOVING ICECROWN. 

It’s so strange to me, I hate/d Burning Crusade with a well, Burning passion. I hated the newness, the strangeness, the change. I love Northrend. Maybe I’m just in a better spot to accept change in my real life, more flexible (my husband would disagree), who knows. But I am loving each zone! I think the only zone I’m not gaga over is Howling Fjord. I went back after leveling to 80 and finished up HFjord anyway but it’s not as interesting to me as the other zones. But Borean Tundra was so interesting, maybe it’s because I love the snow and cold weather. I’m glad I leveled there and just let the quests take me to the next zone up.

Ok, where was I? Druid chicken? No, that’s right - Icecrown. I can’t wait to steal away time this weekend and work on more quests. I’m literally in awe of some of the quests - and the way the zone changes. I finished up the quests for Crusader’s Pinnacle and am loving all of the changes. Yes, I’m LOVING CHANGE.

Retro Raiding, part 2

So I had previously mentioned a notion on the server about locking toons at level 60 when the patch hits and doing all the raids at level. Well, it’s looking more and more like a reality. As much as I’d like to take the easy route and play my rogue who is sitting at 60, I am just not a rogue anymore. I’m a healer. I’m a druid healer, but at the very least I’m a healer. My dwarf priest is 70, and obviously too high to participate in the 60 content. I have a dreanei priest at level 30 and I’m a crazy person but I’m leveling her to 60, hopefully in time for the patch. She is also my only enchanter so I’m kind of excited about leveling her. Flynch has been shelved for the time being in favor of getting my closest in level healer to 60 in time. A friend ran me through Uldamann last night and got me 1 level in about 25 minutes. I also got a few blues to DE (yay!) and a ring that I’ll eventually be able to equip.

Ulduar 10

Our 10 man group is still doing very well. Last night we made several attempts on Mimiron. We had our first person die to the bomb-frogger on the way, and even though we had a bunch of tweaks to make (we kept losing the MT during phase 1, people clipping the laser barrage, etc.) and completely learning phase 4, we were able to pull out a win, Stalwart style. During the evening, I lost both rolls on Druid tier token items - the helm and the shoulders. I did, however, win the Shoulderguards of Assimilation. Yay! Leather healy stuffs! The Mimiron win was so gratifying because we worked so hard and it required such teamwork. I hope they do well on Wednesday night, due to some RL issues I have to miss the raid.

Achievement Updates

I was able to finish my last cooking daily - EVER (I hope) - on Saturday and receive my Chef’s Hat. I have to say, I don’t notice any cooking speed increase. Is that on an upcoming patch and I assumed it was already live? Either way, it’s pretty silly to wear your Chef’s Hat when you’re questing in Icecrown. Oops. I should make better use of the Equipment Manager feature, eh?   I hope at some point they make a reason to do the cooking daily again.  I’m missing some outland recipes from those dailies.

My mini lan party for my birthday was a good time - we ran BRD and I got the achievement, finally haha. It was a good time all around, I had 3 50ish toons in tow and everyone got some good xp and good drops. One of the 3 was a good friend of my husband’s and I was pretty happy that we got him his very first epic drop (that he’s too low to use yet haha).

Last night during our 10 man, we also got the Don’t Stand in the Lightning achievement, which was a nice surprise. I think those are my favorite achievements - the ones you don’t expect : ) The mimiron kill also gave me The Keepers of Ulduar achievement.

All in all - a great weekend for me for achievements and having fun with real life friends in the game. Now to put my nose to the grindstone and get my baby priesty to 60. And soon.

Ahhh the weekend!

 

This is the last day of the strangest work week of my life.  I actually had to look up the Spanish translation (for our cleaning crew) for “please shampoo the carpets due to a biological accident”.  Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m looking forward to seeing the HP movie.  I’ve spent hardly anytime in game this week, but managed to thoroughly enjoy our 10 man Uld raid nights. 

Things that kept me sane this week

• I discovered this sissy robe blog and have found myself sitting at work, reading the blog, and laughing my ass off.  Out loud.  Looking like a moron at my desk.  :) 
• One of the People-Everyone-Knows on the server posted a diddy on the realm forums about doing some Retro raiding, but doing it with level 60 toons locked (ala patch 3.2) at that level.  Very exciting!  I’m dusting off my old rogue, who hasn’t moved since a few runs in Molten Core.  I’m embarrassed to show her Armory as she is in half RP crap, half Nightslayer gear – and wielding a Finkle’s Skinner blade… Oh the shame!  But I’m looking forward to Old School content again!
• I’m only 2 Cooking Awards from my Chef Hat :)

Stuff to look forward to…

On Saturday night, one of my friends is coming over and we are “geeking out” all night and playing WoW.  This is a “present” from my husband in that if my little boy wakes up or cries during the evening, I don’t have to stop what I’m doing to take care of him.  I’m so excited, she’s leveling a hunter (among others) but I think she’s around level 50ish now.  Time to get a BRD group together and get me my achievement.. I mean, get her some gear!  That just leaves Blackfathom Deeps as my remaining old world dungeon to complete and maybe I’ll have the motivation then to complete it.  Assuming the instance server cooperates, maybe I can get both on Saturday night! :)

Random Achievements

 

Friday night (I think?  This weekend was hard to keep track of) a handful or so of us went to Blackwing Lair.  We fooled around in UBRS and got a few people the Jenkins Achievement while our priest solo’d the instance portal boss.  His crippling “additional servers” attack was no match for her and soon we were all standing in Razorgore’s entrance wondering what in the hell we do.  Most of us had been there before, but on other toons.  Do we kite them?  Who’s killing mages?  Can’t we just tank him?  So, it was a laughable kill and we did it so fast that we got the glitch where more dragonkin spawned after the fact and we all had to zone out.  Of course, I zoned back in and then was distracted by my husband reading me something from Fark and I didn’t realize I was getting pummeled by like 20 dragons.  Oops.  Somewhere in there, I got Mind on My Money – yay!  I would have thought I would have already had this, but I guess I really don’t instance that much and really the only money that I loot comes from trash and bosses that Duranub bumps into.

So we rolled through that content and Yay!  I got my Blackwing Lair achievement.  I totally feel that I should have gotten an achievement for actually getting a new Onyxia Scale Cloak.  I have one on my hunter and my priest, but never had gotten one for Sinny. 

This other achievement, I’ll Take You All On has me a little confused.  Two of the three criteria are to participate in killing a couple of the bigger mobs in the gauntlet side.  It apparently doesn’t have to be all during the same fight because I was on the gauntlet side on Wednesday night and in the Arena side on Monday night.  Either way, WOOT. 

On Saturday, I was looking through my quest log in an attempt to clear some other stuff out so I could take on more Dustwallow Marsh quests and had one for Karazhan.  In reality, it was for Setthek Halls as I need some book from there.  I haven’t gotten to that step on my druid mount quest so we couldn’t summon the extra guy for the mount but Belghast and I duo’d the instance.  It was a success overall, except when I got a little excited with Typhoon and pulled another group, including a controller.  Bel proceeded to kill me pretty quickly and I had to run back.  Got my regular and heroic Achievements for the instance. 

So I sit at 4870 Achievement points now.  I’m enjoying the game more than ever and getting to see some amazing content with a great group of people. 

Loremaster Quest, Officially Underway

 

Eastern Kingdom

Well, Friday night I found myself with some extra playtime so I thought I’d go ahead and dig into questing in Ye Olde Worlde.  I started in the Dwarf area, making sure I had completed quests in Kharanos, the lil camp over by Gnomeregan, the Quarry that is on the way to Loch Modan, and then checked both Gates.  I had missed a quest in the quarry, and a couple in the North Gate area.  I finished those up and moved into Loch Modan and Thelsamar.  I knew I had a quest in Thels that would take me to the Badlands but I was hoping to stick to a natural progression, as if I were leveling again.  Yeah, that didn’t happen… SHINY EXCLAMATION POINT OMG.  So, I knocked off a few quests in the Badlands that I had not done yet and moved to the Wetlands. 

Nothing missed in the Wetlands, which surprised me because I hate hate hate the Selma’s Ooze bag quest because I can never get those rat bastards to drop it for me.  I guess it had at some point, because she had no quest for me.  Then I got to Thandol Span.  I was a bit excited because there were 2 quests that I knew I hadn’t done and had never done on ANY of my toons (grumbles something about alts…).  The quest from the dwarf on the broken part of the bridge and the waterlogged letter.  Well, I missed the jump to the dwarf and was so busy cursing myself that I forgot to look for the letter.  Sigh.

So, Aquatic Form GO!  I swam to Faldir’s Cove and went allll the way back to the bridge.  Yay!  I made the jump, got the quest… and oh, right.  The letter.  So, I dove into the water, found it after a few minutes of searching (ok a few minutes of searching and alt tabbing out to check wowhead for the coordinates).  Got it and then… yes, swam back to Faldir’s Cove… Ugh.  I had a ton of quests that I had not done in Southshore, like 5.  5 = a ton. 

I had started the evening at 573/700 EK and finished at 600/700.  Whee!  Saturday afternoon I knocked off a couple quests from either Ironforge or Stormwind, I forget.  I have a toddler so I’m lucky that I can remember to turn any of these quests in… Somehow I ended up at 604/700.

Kalimdor

I had zero intention of doing any questing in Kalimdor until I was much further along in EK.  One of the quests that I picked up in either Stormwind or Ironforge sent me to Theramore.  Hmm a few exclamation points.  I’ll just do these real quick.  I don’t remember Theramore being a hot bed of activity. 

When the hell did Theramore become the hot bed of activity?!

Honestly, I haven’t ever EVER gotten so lost in the story and lore of questlines like I did in Theramore/Dustwallow Marsh.  I was practically racing to the next quest to find out what happened next.  I was joyously trampling along through the swampy areas, over hills, bumping into things here and there.  So many quests!  My Sunday was lost to questing in Theramore/Dustwallow.  I started the weekend at 423/700… I am now sitting at 485!!!!!!!!!!!  What in the world!  I still have a few that I need to do there, but I was starting to get a little sore just sitting at the computer (so I open my blog to you know, sit at my computer).  I’m amazed… totally.  Who would have thunk it!?  Theramore!  And actually, I am really tempted to level my next closest alt to the zone just to do them again! 

This is not like me, ask anyone who knows me.  I don’t read quest text, I barely even know where I’m going when I quest because I don’t read it.  I had a blast! 

I guess there’s a point to Loremaster anyway….

Dear Alchemist’s Cache, <3 you. Always, Sinny

 

The door opens and closes in the small room next to me, the dividing window slides to the left.  I start..

Forgive me father, it has been one week and one day since my last Achievement.  The holidays, they tore me away from the game and prevented me from working on any reputation grind, searching for random books, and stealing money from corpses.  I shall do better, I promise!

Hmm my penance… I guess it should be to finish that freaking Argent Crusade rep grind before I start really crazy into the Loremaster stage of my life. 

We had another amazing night of raiding on Wednesday, with our 10 man group.  We smooshed Freya pretty easily and got another huge Alchemist’s Cache.  I really love those!  We got a stupid amount of Flask of Pure Mojo, which I find to be kind of useless.  In fact, none of the healers in either the 10 or 25 man have mana issues so no one wanted the flasks.  I have them all on the Auction House so that I can buy real flasks that our tank and dps need.  After downing Freya, we backtracked and took out the bosses that we had skipped on the way in resulting in us clearing every single boss we had ever killed in one single night, going over our regular ending time by 15 minutes.  Amazing.  Flame Leviathan, XT-002, Kologarn, Freya, Iron Council, Ignis, Razorscale.

Best place for Runecloth drops…

I ran a friend, another 80, through Strat (undead) the other night, too.  He’d never been there (a fact which blows me away) and he needed runecloth to level tailoring.  So, we get out there and he says “should I just go resto (shammy) and heal you then?” when I switched to my boomkin spec.  LoL.  “We won’t need healing, enjoy dpsing” I say.  We cleared that place in something like 12 minutes.  Seems slow, but mainly because we were looting stuff for Runecloth and he was DE’ing the boss drops (he was also leveling his enchanting).  I remember when Strat would kick our butts.  It was always such a chore to get through that place – crypt crawlers and their nets, those damn banshees that silence… ughh those boxes that you get too close on and they are full of rats or something.  But it was such fun, having a challenging huge instance with lots of bosses and the creepy streets of Stratholme were always hiding some horrible being.  I was hoping we’d have some beginner luck and maybe see the mount, but no such luck.

Whew!

Well, I feel much better after yesterday’s post. 

Last night we had a great time in our 10 man run.  We ran into Freya and beat our heads against her for a good while.  I think we had 10 minutes left on the trash respawn timer when everything clicked into place and we won.  We tried a few different strategies over that hour plus to take down the detonator plants in a more safe manner, and also the 3 pack fights got a tweak or two. 

We were having a good time with all the herbs around the area.  We joked that this was the situational test of this encounter – can your raids’ herbalists keep their heads while seeing yellow dots on their mini map, knowing that a Frost Lotus looms just over the hedge… We were pleasantly surprised to find an Alchemist’s Cache amongst the rewards to our hard fight.  Our DK and Hunter each received 5 flasks, while the remaining potions, elixirs, and herbs were guild banked.  I was also lucky enough to win the roll on the tier8 gloves.  Wheeee! 

We made 2 attempts on Thorim before the evening was over, getting a good feel for the gauntlet and definitely looking forward to Wednesday when we can make a b-line for Freya and Thorim after knocking off those in our way.  I look forward to the new possible option of extending raid lockouts that may be coming in the next patch.  If we were able to extend that another week, I’m sure we would down Thorim and keep our steamroll going. 

A disappointment

I was disappointed to learn that a member of one of the more respected guilds on our server was discovered to be running a bot to farm Timbermaw rep.  The video was captured by a horde character that is known on the server as being a decent guy/straight shooter, so no real reason to doubt it.  The chatter on the forums from the botter and a representative or two from the guild is showing everyone the true colors of this guild and I hope they can take swift action to remove the botter from their ranks.  If Argent Dawn is nothing else, it is rabid regarding the defense of the community as a whole.  Ninjas and whorish server transfers typically do not find a welcome home on Argent Dawn, on either side of the banner, and usually transfer off post-haste. 

QQ

 

Honestly.  I’m SO tired of it.  The constant whining and complaining and bitching about EVERYTHING.  Specifically, holiday achievements.  It started with the Winterveil one, and waaaa I can’t pvp in my gnome costume because I shapeshift.  And let me just say that I tried doing the achievement and would end up losing my gnome costume within minutes – mainly cuz I suck that badly at PVP.  But did I bitch about how unfair it was?  No.  Then came the Valentine’s one.  OH MY GOD stop bitching about RNG with candy bags.  HONESTLY.  So everyone cries so much on the wow forums that Blizzard FREAKING GOES IN AND FIXES IT, after the fact. 

That was their downfall.  They bent to the QQ.  My almost-2 year old doesn’t want to take a nap sometimes. If I caved and said “oh ok, no nap for you”, he would know all he has to do is cry and he’d get out of anything he doesn’t want to do. 

So, Love’s Fool got their 6/8 fix for the bag candies.  Yes, I was lucky that I got all mine, but, you know.  LUCK.  I’m not always that lucky.  For the Valentine’s one, I woke up early and tried to find my way around the event and various quests.  I barely got a dress, I think I got the only one I pulled the whole event on the last day.

• Brewfest… QQ … changes incoming.  Don’t even get me started.
• Children’s Week: School of Hard Knocks – god, seriously.  I’m worse at PVP than anyone and I managed to get it.
• Noblegardener.  Camp your own egg and STFU.  People get up and leave, or they are slow.  Camp it and eventually you’ll get it. 

It gives me a headache.  So I log in this morning and hit the forums, expecting to peruse the latest goings-on on the Argent Dawn forums (seriously, no drama today?), and the Achievements forums hoping to find something interesting to jump start my morning.  QQ The festival ended.  Really?  You couldn’t see this coming?  We have a freaking calendar.  Complaining because now they can’t finish their quest.  If you are that busy in real life, or can’t rearrange your schedule to fit in a few quests then Achievements and the Metas are just not for you.  That’s just it.  I’m sorry, they just aren’t for you.  GET OVER IT.  Find something else in game you enjoy because obviously, THIS IS NOT GIVING YOU ANY JOY.

Don’t forget the official Scorchling whine thread.  THE LOOT, ITS FREAKING RANDOM.  ALL OF IT.  Not everyone can get a special pet or mount.  I’M SORRY.  I didn’t get a scorchling.  Why?  Because I didn’t try and who knows if I would have even seen it drop, let alone win the roll.  I knew that I wouldn’t have the time to run that instance as often as I would need to give it a good go.  I’ll just have to enjoy seeing them when my friend’s pull them out in raids, or a stranger in Dalaran.  Maybe next year.  I got the little spirit of summer vanity pet with some of the flowers I collected.  Then I had 250 or so flowers leftover after getting the outfit and following achievement.  I sold back the shoulders, got the pet, and then was happy to find out they had reset the fires.  I went back to the towns I remember hitting before the reset and picked up more flowers.  I knew I wouldn’t have enough to get the dancing flames pet, so I bought the shoulders back (completionist, sue me) and then bought like 3 stacks of Smorcs.  Did I cry about not getting both pets?  No. 

Gawd, there are a lot of things I want in this game – if I cried about not getting everything then I wouldn’t have time to play the game.

/rant off

I feel better

I Have the Coolest Friends

Really, I do…

I’m scared to say it, because I don’t want to jinx it but dizam, our 10 man group is the bomb.  It feels like we have the best class balance and the best personality balance a group can have.  We steamrolled through last night, taking out Flame Leviathan, Ignis, Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, Iron Council, Auriyia, and Hodir.  We had a couple hiccups on Iron Council, but it was stuff we could easily correct and avoid on the next attempt.  Everything else went very smoothly; there was friendly and fun banter on Vent.  Nothing is really getting DE’d because a class isn’t represented, it’s getting DE’d if it’s a duplicate.  We have a pally, a shaman, warrior, druid,  shadow priest, a holy priest, a hunter, deathknight, and 2 mages.  The pulls are getting to be muscle memory and everyone knows what their responsibilities are.  Love it!!

I did have the funniest thing happen on Razorscale.  We had just finished up Flame Leviathan and headed to Razor when my little one started fussing, so I needed to AFK for a quick 2 mins to get him back to sleep.  When I came back, they said “Ok as soon as Sinny gets back, we’ll start it up”.  And I said I was back on Vent and then looked at my shapeshifting bar… Hm, where’s my tree… OH NO! “WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT” I hit N and click Activate for my resto spec… “too late, we just started it up”.  I thought I had gotten it in time but then I see “Entering Combat” and my spec switch stops mid stream.  “uh guys? I’ll be dps’ing for this…” It was really fun, too : )  We got the achievement for A Quick Shave even.

We had one wipe on Hodir, I can’t even really remember what went wrong, but when we did our 2nd attempt, we got the I Have the Coolest Friends achievement.  I think the only fight that I had mana issues on was Iron Council and I think that was mainly because I was healing our Pally tank and I’m not used to healing him so I can’t anticipate his damage yet.  I had a lot of overhealing on that fight from spamming Nourish and constant Blooms.  I’ll be conscious of that on our next encounter with The Council and see what I can do to be more efficient with my mana.

The Badlands

Before the raid started, I finished up a couple quests that I had in my quest log.  Trying to make room for Loremaster craziness.  I did one quest that was inside Uldaman, but not actually *in* the instance and it didn’t count towards my total.  So I abandoned the rest of the chain for the time being.  Sure it would count towards my Seeker achievement but I’ll have that without problem when I have Loremaster (the big Loremaster, not just Classic) done. 

Blog Front

As it pertains to this blog, I’m tweaking some of my layout.  I’m learning more about blogging from practice-makes-better-but-not-perfect and reading other blogs and seeing what elements I like as a reader.  So, stay tuned and hope you (the one or two people who are reading) enjoy it! :)