OMG Kill it!

 Honey! Hurry, and bring a shoe or something.  I’m pretty sure this is the biggest bug I’ve ever seen!  

Ok, that’s the kinda shit that I find hilarious at 4am when I’m awake for no reason. 

Sifting through my wow screenshot folder is always a treat.  I never know what I’ve snapped pictures of along the way.  Here’s one of my baby priesty (who is 46 now wewt!)  

She looks like the cutting room floor of a Pixar studios, if animation studios actually had a cutting room floor.  Honestly.  The purple is my doing, I added it because at the time, it looked good with what I was wearing.  But really?  A yellow and aqua ankle length skirt?

 

 

It’s official, 3.2

I have really mixed emotions about this patch hitting today.  I’m looking forward to a few things in the patch, and honestly I think I’ll re-read the patch notes and maybe get re-excited about it.  Mostly, I’m kinda wishing it dropped next Tuesday instead of this.  We have the Retro Raid up and almost rarin’ to go, except I have to get another 14 levels on my priest.  And some people just rolled their toons, so you figure they are probably not going to be ready for 2 weeks-ish.  And then you have some people that are at 60, waiting for the rest of us.  It just puts extra pressure on top of the pressure that I have already put on myself to get my priest to 60.  This will be my first attempt at actually having “an active alt”.  I have never been able to sustain more than one character at a time.  I can’t split my loyalties between them, so I end up favoring one.  We’ll see how it goes. 

A whole lotta nothin’, oh except Yay achievements!

We hit up Ulduar10 last night, after rolling a giant goose egg last Wednesday.  That was the night Argent Dawn took a major crap on our raid schedule, as we were attempting our first hardmode Flame Leviathan.  We failed at getting Dwarfageddon, which we failed at again last night, and the server crashed during combat with FL.  So, last night we tried the hardmode again and I gotta say, I didn’t really tell a difference, other than we were pulling pyrite like freaking crazy.  We succeeded and everyone was awarded 2 Emblems of Conquest.  Yay!  Typical ho hum gear, no healing leather stuff that I needed (just the chest that I have, and have since upgraded).  We got the Orbital Bombardment achievement, and then moved to XT.  We tried doing the Achievement there, but when we didn’t kill the heart on the first pass, we lost the chance.  We did, however, get the speed kill on him, which was exciting to see that popup. 

Kologarn was per usual, and we moved on to Auriaya.  During the fight, our Resto Shammy says “man, we have such a great group, we just never wipe on anything, this is so great”.

Yeah.

Seriously.

So, we did one shot Auriaya, and after wiping on trash to Freya, and wiping to Freya, and wiping 4 or so times to the trash after Freya…

Yeah.

STFU.

Who jinxes a group like that?  The trash after Freya was a miscalculation on our part, actually because we had never attempted Thorim on the same night as a Freya kill and we were separating the trash too much.  As our hunter exclaimed on vent “OH GAWD THEY ARE HAVING SEPARATION ANXIETY”.  I almost fell out of my chair laughing.  We managed to get to Thorim, finally, and split off into groups.  We decided while buffing and eating a fish feast that since our attention spans seemed to be waning, it’s best if we don’t go for an achievement or hardmode on this encounter.  Except, yeah, we did.  Accidentally.  I got the achievement (so everyone else must have gotten it last Monday when I was gone) for Siffed – even though we didn’t actually finish combat, or win for that matter.

I got an achievement because we accidentally pulled too soon.  I feel so cheap.

So, that’s it.  We now move to where we can extend our raid ID and hopefully get some better attempts at the General and beyond.  I hope the patch goes smoothly *crosses fingers*

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

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.

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. 

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. 

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! :)

<insert catchy title here before publishing>

 

I meant to get a post up yesterday but the day literally slipped away from me.  When I looked up from my desk at work, it was already 2:30 pm and I had a pile of work that would take me well past my 3:30 quitting time.  Today was looking much the same but I put my nose down and worked hard, carving out a half hour to type up what’s been floating around in my head for a few days.

Mini Lan Party!

Saturday night, I did a crazy thing and packed up my husband’s iMac and went to my friends’ place and we had an impromptu mini lan party!  Mike and Cindy are two of my “converts” into the WoW world, and I received my Zhevra mount by referring Mike.  We decided to tackle Maraudon to get them both some gear.  Their priest and hunter, respectively, are 48 and were in desperate need of gear.  We had some problems getting into the instance initially as “additional instances cannot be launched” whenever I try to do anything in the Old World or Outlands.  We fooled around on lowbie druids until trying again, and were finally successful.  Some nice gear dropped for them, and I think there was only one piece of gear that got disenchanted.  There are so many things in this game that I take for granted and hadn’t stopped to think how I learned the things I know in game.  For instance, I said “oh just auto follow me and I can run us there” and they both looked at me with a blank stare.  Auto what?  2ish months in the game and neither had discovered the Follow option on the portrait menu.  I imagine I was just as frustrating to a friend of mine shortly after release when he would try to help me finish quests (I have a problem reading Quest text… I just.. don’t read it).

I laughed as I told them about things had changed in game.  How back when I first got my mount at 40, I was in Stranglethorn Vale and the bridges used to dismount you.  They thought that was hysterical.  And how it would take an hour to mail yourself something.  From your own alt!  I told them about the legendary spamming from Blackrock when their server is down, and told them about some of the major drama that Argent Dawn has seen over the years.  It was fun to catch them up on stuff and it was nice to remember all those quirks in the old game.

I did pick up a few quests and completed them as I waited for them to find their way from Ratchet to Desolace and get their flight paths.  This threw the “planning planning planning” part of my Loremaster Quest out the window.  I have a full quest log, a bunch of quests here and there and I’m scared to abandon anything.  I have a bunch of quest items in my bank, who knows what those are for.  So I’m re-evaluating my approach I think : )  I’m only going to concentrate on Old World quests first.  I’m going to abandon any quest that is Burning Crusade or Wrath and I’ll pick those up later.  I need to look up the quest items that I have and figure out what they are for.  Then I will start tackling zones. 

Aggro Warning

It seems strange, so many funny stories or recollections that I mention are also talked about in Tales of the Aggronaut.  I guess this is because Bel and I are friends IRL, though half a country apart.  It’s also because he is my guild leader, and my raid leader.  He mentioned in a recent post about doing a little spring cleaning of the guild roster, etc., and this affects me because he promoted me to officer, a position I held long ago.  It’s nice to know that he finds me a responsible person and he knows I won’t do anything overtly dumb.  I just do small dumb things like forget to go Tree Form on the Ignis pull.  And on a Hodir pull.  Oops : )  I totally make up for those oopsies by proc’ing 8 extra Flasks for him hehehe.  So, thanks for the nod Bel : )

Anyway, we had a great run last night and finally put the beat down on Hodir!  Everyone did a great job and we managed to pick up the achievement Cheese the Freeze.  This was our 10 man run and we actually filled up quickly and were underway without much wasted time.  We ran into the Hodir wall about 8 or 9 times before it all falling into place.  I can’t wait to do it again!  Well, I can’t wait to win again, or fail at winning a few times and then winning : )  We started trash on Freya but never made it to the actual boss pull as we ran out of time.  We took down Ignis earlier and our new Pally OT is doing a fantastic job.  It’s nice to play with people who know what they are doing, and if they don’t know, they know how to learn.  We had some great communication on vent, aside from Euron bringing up horrible songs which led to a discussion about often misheard lyrics.  I choked on my water a couple times when people were sharing their favorites hehehe.  There was one that was something like “Make love to a calculator” instead of the Love in an Elevator (Aerosmith).  Classic…

Loremaster Ysinnia?

 

Not quite yet.  But I think I’ve decided to start working on this as my next large project.  I’m going to finish up the Argent Crusader assignment that I got on the Achievement forums and then not ask for another assignment.  This is a huge undertaking because when I leveled this toon in Classic WoW, I didn’t quest very much.  I think I’m something like 160 short on Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor is something like 300 short, I haven’t looked recently.  I just know it’s a number that when my brain sees it, it goes “oh god, so many to go!”.

I’ve been kicking the idea around in my head lately, but it’s not something you just jump into, ya know?  I mean, I HAVE TO MAKE LISTS.  AND PLAN.  Yeah, I’m like that.  So my first order of business, after completing my current assignment, is to make a list of each zone starting with the lowbie/starting zones.  I know I did some of the Human starting area when I was grinding out my Ambassador title, but I think I stopped around the Goldshire area.  Not just because I hit exalted, but because when you hang out near Goldshire too long on Argent Dawn, you have to bathe frequently and you get a rep for “hanging in Goldshire wink wink”. 

So, lists of starting areas and then to Wowhead.com to start pulling lists of quests in the zone.  I also have to remember to hit the Easy to Miss thread on the Quest forums.  There are a ton of quests there that I’m sure I missed.  I need to give myself a deadline for completing it and I won’t know a realistic timeline until I see everything laid out on paper.  I do know that I’m going to make a timeline for the entire Achievement, not just Eastern Kingdom or Kalimdor.  There are too many quests that shuffle you between continents, so I want to take it as a natural progression of zones and quests and not try to get hung up on watching one specific continent. 

Such planning!  Who would have thought you could translate your OCD into an Achievement!? : )  Anyway, that’s my summer goal. 

News from the Front

We had a fantastic run last night in Ulduar25.  Life found me with some playtime unexpectedly and I checked with the healing lead to see if I was needed as a backup or anything and they did have a spot.  Their first night in the raid was Tuesday so we were up to Auriaya last night.  It was a bit tricky getting the pull coordinated but once the pull clicked, it just took some old fashioned pinching and pulling to get everyone to fit right.  I even got to dps!  Of course, that was after 4 of the 6 healers were dead, we’d lost our main tank, both off tanks, and about half of the dps.  She was at 1% so I started pew pew wrath wrath cuz I didn’t really have anyone to heal ; )

I did notice one amazing thing during this fight.  I spammed Nourish and all my hots on our MT for the entire fight and only one time did I notice that I was below 50% mana.  One time.  I usually try to hit my Spirit Glass Trinket once kind of early in the fight, once again when we are about halfway and then it’s up for the end when things are getting tight.  I instinctively hit my trinket and then glanced at my mana and I was at 80%.  Hardly any desperate need for a quick regen but I used the opportunity to throw a few hots on myself to alleviate some of the other healers mana. 

We headed on over to Iron Council after that and after a couple false starts and some reassignments, we were able to down them.  I have to say, I much prefer experiencing the fight vertical, as opposed to the 10 man version I did Wednesday night when I was busy healing the floor.  I picked up the heroic Achievement for I Choose You, Stormcaller, also.  So I’m helping rez people and didn’t really look at the loot.  I never do, really.  Now that we get our badges auto-looted, who needs to?  So when the Master Looter linked all the items in Raid, I had to scroll back up to make sure I read it right.  Phaelia’s Vestments of the Sprouting Seed!  I whispered the Master Looter with the !command to find out how much dkp I had, confident that I had more than the other resto druid I breathed a sigh of relief.  I felt slightly guilty because I had picked up a really nice chest the night before in 10 man, but this was THE chest I had been hoping for since stepping foot in Ulduar. 

Flame on!

Before the raid started, I finished up the Flame Warden Meta Achievement after stealing and turning in the Undercity flame.  Apparently I had gotten credit for Silvermoon City but not Undercity during the reset of the quests earlier in the week.  4 more holidays to go before I can check off that section!

So, Ulduar really does drop Leather Resto gear…

 

/italian accent …Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday

So Wednesdays and Mondays have become my almost-standard raid nights now.  I did Ulduar25 for a month or two on Tuesdays and Thursdays until real life stepped in and strongly suggested I rethink my WoW schedule.  So instead of 25 with the raiding group, I’m doing 10 man with a portion of the raiding group.  We go in on Wednesday nights, have a lot of fun, clear some bosses, try some new things, and finish up what we can on Monday nights.  It’s very casual and a lot of fun.  We are getting in somewhat of a rhythm with each other and even though 2 or 3 faces may change from week to week, there’s a pretty solid core of 7 that run it. 

Last night was no exception.  We assembled and started a little late but nonetheless got underway and knocked off Flame Leviathan, XT (which gave me a Nerf Gravity Bombs achievement) aaaaand my first piece of Leather healy loot from Ulduar!  Vest of the Glowing Crescent and I was the only one who would use it so Yay!  I had won the roll on Spark of Hope several runs back but this was the first Leather Healer gear I had seen drop.  I was beginning to think that only Pally and Shammy gear dropped in Ulduar.  We downed Kologarn and then Iron Council, which I had not been there for but the group had done it a couple weeks back.  I was totally helpful in the kill (which was our 3rd attempt I believe) in that I was rolling Lifeblooms on my dead body for probably 90% of the fight.  Note to self: Overload kills trees.  Well, that’s not right, trees not watching for Overload kills trees.  We finished the night on Razorscale.  Anywho, IC gave me a couple of achievements for the night.  It’s funny because I didn’t even realize I had gotten achievements for it, I was just so happy we killed them!  I didn’t find out until this morning when I logged in and (the first thing I do when I log in) hit Y to bring up my achievements. 

I had a lot of fun throughout the night, raiding, even on wipes.  On XT, I dps’d during two of the heart phases which was fun, and then raid healed the rest of the fight.  I also got to go boomkin for the pulls right before Auriaya.  I reverted my UI back so my bars aren’t fading so switching specs on a moment’s notice didn’t cause quite the anxiety that it did last week.  I was also not MT healing this time around, so my focus was OT, general raid healing and hotting the MT.  I played around with some of the timing, trying to get 3 LB stacks on the MT and then weaving in a couple on the OT, and letting them bloom and return mana to me, and then distributing some rejuvs to the dps taking splash damage.  I always love thowing a regrowth on another healer because a) my regrowths hit for a lot and b) I know the hot will keep them mostly topped off and I can swiftmend it if they run into trouble.  Last night, we had a new to the group healer with us, a shammy.  He did an awesome job and I think the combination of priest-druid-shammy was fantastic.  We all have our strengths and areas where we need someone watching our back and we just sort of meshed last night. 

Flynch!

The Midsummer festival is almost over for me, I have 1 more fire to extinguish in Kalimdor and then I need to redo the horde cities since I did Org and Undercity before the reset.  Redoing these should give me the Thief’s Reward quest, and with that my crown and final Achievement for the Meta.  Flame Warden is not a title I particularly care about, and I doubt seriously that I’ll ever display it.  I just like checking things off : )  Finishing the meta will also give me the opportunity to log back in on my baby druid, Flynch.  I’ve been itching to play her again, much to my surprise.  I don’t really see it as playing an alt, it’s more like a little nostalgia with my main druid hehe.  But I’d like to tack on some levels on her during the festival so I can use the 10% buff to experience gain.  This weekend should be quiet on the home-front, no birthdays to attend, no crazy festivals… I should be able to get to 18 at least, and she’s at 12 now.  I’m walking the fine line between wanting to go crazy on Achievements for her, but so far I’ve been able to just enjoy playing her and focus on Achievements on Sinny. 

A little bit of everything

 

Ulduar10 fun

Last night was a nice mix of raiding, achievements, and old fashioned fun. I logged in to get a couple things done on the Midsummer Festival achievements so I headed over to Exodar, where I heard it was much easier to do the torch catching quests. I’m not a fan of Exodar, I get lost easily in Stormwind so Exodar is a confuzzled mess for me. And let me just say, I’m impressed with any Horde that are able to find the dang bonfire.

I finally find the fire and pick up the torch catching quest. I tried it a couple times and I am a complete moron sometimes. I would get the torch catching buff and then run back to the bonfire to light another one and toss it. Duh. It’s a chain of them. I must be the last person to find this out because everyone else, it seems, has finished the dang quest. So once I figure that out, well hell, it was so easy! I watched the shadows on the ground and the only time I had a problem was when someone else’s shadow crossed near mine and I lost which one was my torch. So about that time, I got an invite for a group from Belghast, thinking he was grouping me to help me find this stupid bonfire I was complaining about. Newwwwwp, it was raid time hehe. He held off converting it to a raid so me and our priest could finish the quests we were working on and then we were off to Ulduar. We had cleared to Auriaya the previous Wednesday and were ready to head for Hodir.

Freeze Frame! 

Our group makeup last night included 2 resto druids and a priest, and we were pretty heavy on ranged dps: 2 mages, a shadow priest and a hunter.  Throw in a tank, a dps warrior and a deathknight and we were off!  The entire night seemed like a total comedy of errors, when in reality we were all learning the pulls. At one point, we got snakes from the mounds of snow, a reverant and all his friends, and a Champion. Ahahhahahah good times. We were making some decent attempts at Hodir, learning the best strategy for our group and making tweaks along the way. Of course, someone piped up that whenever they saw the Flash Freeze warning, he thought of the J Geils song, “Freeze Frame”. So, that was stuck in all our heads after that : )  It was a fun fight, I am always in constant motion anyway when I’m healing so it wasn’t a big change for me to move to shake the Biting Cold debuff.  We switched around healing assignments to give our priest a little more time to dispel and that seemed to help a lot.  She could focus on the MT and dispelling while we druids raid healed.  I think we have a good handle on the fight now and the general mechanics, just need to put it all together and color it with win.

Winds of the North, consume you!

Unfortunately, it was actually a Storm in the South that consumed us.  We heard what you never want to hear from your priest on Vent: “guys my latency is in the red”. That, followed by broken Vent chatter from her, and finally a disconnect. Our Raid Leader got a text from her saying her power had gone out due to a storm so we hung around for 20 minutes or so seeing if her power came back up. No such luck so a few of us decided to head over and kill Ahune for the Midsummer Festival. Yay for getting the Frost Lord achievement!

Wrapping up the evening

During the raid, a couple of us were talking about the torch juggling achievement for the Festival and I was pretty worried about it. Even though I finally figured out the torch catching thing, I was pretty sure that I would screw up the juggling thing somehow. I also didn’t want to buy a ton of torches and waste the blossoms. One of the raid members said he’d put a good bunch of torches in the guild bank for everyone so I headed there and pulled out 10 or so. This gave me 15 to try the achievement with. I went to a quiet little corner so I wasn’t affected by any lag and tried it out. Of course, I had forgotten to turn on the achievement tracking so I was just standing there flipping torches and had no idea how many I was doing or anything. So I stopped spamming the mouse click and #1 on my bar long enough to put up the tracking. Yeah, I was moving way too slow to get the achievement hahahaha. So I started spamming faster and ended with 23/40. So I did it one more time, and spammed it as fast as I could and I got 40 with 6 seconds to spare :D Yay!!!!! Torch Juggler!!!! Flame Warden title, I will have you soon!

Achievement freak Ysinnia checking in

I got my reassignment on the forum game, Get that Achievement. I dumped Capture the Flag (thank god) and was reassigned “Argent Champion”. I’m already exalted with Argent Dawn so it shouldn’t be too hard to finish up my Argent Crusade rep. Also, while running around putting out the bonfires, I knocked off the last 3 pests I needed to kill and completed my Pest Control achievement.

Back in the healing groove

 

What’s this other stance…hmmm Moonkin

When I was leveling from 70 to 80, everyone kept telling me to just go Balance, and that it would be easier. Nahh, I’ll stick with Resto. I always believed, and pretty much still do, that you can’t just level a dps spec and then bam! hit 80 and know how to heal. I need to know what all my stuff does, and I learn that by using it over and over in instances and leveling while questing. So I hit 80, I’m healing Naxx and various instances and questing. Well, trying to quest. Dailies took forever! With the introduction of the dual spec option, my questing life improved 1000%. My healing life, I’m afraid, is suffering. The first time I did my dailies as boomkin, I finished about 20-30 minutes sooner than normal. I almost cried I was so happy! With my limited playtime, I’m almost always in my boomkin spec. Because of this, my reflexes are a bit slower than they normally are when I’m healing more frequently. Cuz really, does it matter if stuff dies in 2 seconds or 3, it’s all pew pew and I’m not trying to top the dps charts when I’m grinding Hodir rep. But the 1 second difference is everything when healing.

Healing is fun, I … Ooo is that something shiny?!

The other night, I appealed with puppy dog eyes to Belghast to tank Old Kingdom for me - it’s one of two kills I still needed for my Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. He rounded up some folks and we were off, to a place I’d never been. Instead of being on my toes like I normally would, I lost focus and trailed off to loot something instead of sticking with my tank. Wipe #1. Bel has ADD when it comes to tanking and as a healer, I know that - I just forgot briefly what I was doing. After all, no one cares if the dps stops to loot something. After a couple close calls and a few deaths o’ dps, sorry guys L , we made it to the Insanity fight. Bleh. The first try, everyone had trouble with the tree, and the tree was being a nub and trying to kill the people attacking me. So, second try - I stood and healed myself. Helpless as I watched my parties’ health bars drop ever so slowly, and on vent listening to their frustrations with killing “the tree”. Third try, and possibly fourth before they were finally able to kill the tree and call it a night, having checked off that part of my achievement requirement. Now, if *I* were that indestructible, that would be awesome! Sometimes in a raid, I feel like I’m made of paper - but honestly in a raid I’m not standing there healing myself the whole time. The next step is the Malygos fight and while it doesn’t matter if I do it on 10 or 25, I have the quest for 25 man so I’d like to get it all done in one shot. Guess I need to make sure I’m not rusty on the dragon flyers.

It’s a mana pool, can I go swimming?

I had the chance to redeem myself (at least, to myself) last night when I healed Ulduar 25 for the XT fight and also a couple Kolgarn attempts. I came in as a backup healer as the raid was shorthanded and was losing another healer due to RL stuff. I found I was managing my mana pool a bit better than I had in the last couple raids, and I still love my Spirit-World Glass trinkie and used it a bit more effectively also. Overall, I was pretty happy with my mana management and look forward to being able to test out a few tweaks to my healing rotation. I think I used Nourish more effectively, and while I always make sure my target has a hot on them to get the real benefit of Nourish, sometimes I get a little Regrowth happy. Maybe it’s the pretty green icon, maybe it’s the placement of my button. I’m a clicker, sue me. I’m actually working on revamping my entire UI and will get some screenies once I’m happy with a more final draft of it. Maybe it’s silly but I tend to get in a rut and if I need to change things, then I need to CHANGE things - like, the placement of all my abilities, like the appearance of my head’s up display, etc. It’s all gotta change for me to make the extra tweaks to my healing rotation. God I’m high maintenance =)

4 Achievements + 1 Night = Woo!

Yeah, I never do stuff like this but after reading several wow-related blogs and thinking "oh I should just add to the mix", I finally decided to do it. I blame Belghast, long-time friend, raid leader, guild leader, etc., etc. He started up his blog over a month ago and I enjoy reading it and catching up on things in his world. Plus, when in doubt, blame the warrior. I’ve experienced a ton in this game, been semi-hardcore long ago, went casual then part-time raider again. Through it all, I’ve found something new and interesting to keep me playing the game. My current fascination is the Achievement time-sink.

It’s crack, no heroin.. no wait, I mean Achievements

I participate in the “Get that Achievement” game on the WoW forums, and basically you sign up and give someone above you an assignment/achievement to do and then someone gives you one. My current assignment is the Empire of Zul’Drak, which I am at 41/100. It’ll take a bit of time considering my playtime has ratcheted back to about 8 hours per week. Summertime is exceedingly busy for me; I have a toddler and well, ‘nuff said.

I particularly love getting an achievement that I wasn’t expecting. Like last night, I happened to have a bit more playtime than usual and some guildies were doing Ulduar 10. So I joined them and upon checking, I only needed the chopper for my Three Car Garage achievement. Whee! So I hopped on the chopper, which are so fun by the way. As a druid, I jump a lot and out of habit I was jumping in the chopper. Anyway, so I got my achievement as I expected upon downing Flame Leviathan. The next boss we downed was XT-002 Deconstructor and I got Nerf Engineering! Totally unexpected as I hadn’t looked over the achievements I had or needed for that boss. During Kologarn, I was so focused on healing since it’s a fight I haven’t successfully done yet, I didn’t pay attention to the talk on vent about which achievement we were going for. Yay! We got Disarmed! And then Woo! 100 Emblems of Valor! 4 achievements in one night is a pretty good haul for me.

It’s not ADD, it’s just multitasking…

So I’m currently working on reputation for the Kurenai, Timbermaw, Sha’tari Skyguard, and Cenarion Expedition. Part time, of course : ) I get bored if I focus on one rep at a time. I like logging in and having a bunch of things I can do - I just need to see what I’m in the mood for at the time. I do my cooking and fishing dailies, plus those in Shattrah when I get time. Pretty soon I should be getting my chef hat, and I also do the 7 day waiting game for the eggs in Sholazar.

All this gets pushed aside if I get a tell from one of my friends asking me to heal something they have going, assuming I have the playtime. I love having a list of things I can do instead of logging in and sitting there at the screen thinking, hm another dungeon or quest.. what to do. I don’t do many dungeons, honestly. I have quite a few achievements I could pick up in there but I just don’t have the desire to dungeon crawl right now.

So that’s what’s on my plate right now, Empire of Zul’Drak, various older reps, and cooking/fishing. I can’t even begin to think about Loremaster, Seeker, or various Exalted stages just yet…so....many...things....to....doooooo